 who's a senior fellow at the Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California Berkeley and the Director of Multiverse, the Space Sciences Laboratory Education Group. Dr. Petticolus reserved her BA in Mathematics and Physics at the University of Oregon Honors College and her PhD in Physics studying the Aurora at the University of Alaska, Alaska Fairbanks and from what I understand she has family in Oregon still knows exactly where she's going to be for the Eclipse so won't have to go too far from her own stopping grounds. She's led several NSF and NASA funded natural education programs that provided professional development on physics, birth and space science, as well as cross-cultural collaborations to educators who primarily teach in out of school settings. Dr. Petticolus is currently leading the Eclipse mega movie project, a crowdsourcing effort to collect and share images across the path of totality during the 2017 total eclipse of the Sun. She also provides science consulting services to several NASA funded education and communication initiatives and her passion for equity and inclusion in all aspects of society and for the knowledge gained through scientific practices influences all the work that she's involved in. So please welcome Dr. Laura Petticolus. Hello everyone. It's so fun to see you putting in where you're from on the chat window. That's awesome. And thank you for those of you who are on the east coast. It's nine o'clock there I know. It's just close to my bedtime. So I appreciate you coming on today. So I'm going to share my screen. I have a PowerPoint presentation that I'm going to kind of talk through and hopefully this will work well for you all. All right. So here's let's see. All right. So here we go. And I know Brian said he would monitor the chat window. So and also the question and answer for me. So he'll be interrupting me and Vivian as well. If you have pressing questions, otherwise we'll have questions also at the end. And I'm going to try to keep track of time so we can ensure we get to the book raffle at the end before you all have to leave. Okay, so today I'm going to talk about a project called the Eclipse mega movie which we started working on about four years ago five years ago in anticipation for the 2017 Eclipse across America. And this project is a crowdsourced project for science and for education and also for outreach. So I'm going to start just briefly with reflection and have you all think about some questions here and and you can think about them and reflect on them in any way that makes sense for you so you could put them in the chat box or answers in the chat box. If you I saw some of you have people with you watching this so you could talk to the person next to you. You could write it down on a piece of paper or you could just think about it in your mind. So here are the questions I'd like you to reflect on a little bit. The first just have you seen a solar eclipse before and if so did you see a partial annular or total solar eclipse and if you've seen multiple ones which ones of those have you seen. I'd also like for you to reflect on what was it like as an experience to be part of that solar eclipse if you were if you did experience that. Did you capture images or videos while you were participating or experiencing that and also did you contribute to scientific understandings of the Sun. I know many of you as amateurs often do contribute to our scientific understanding of all sorts of astronomical bodies so it could be that you you've actually done some of that work. So take some time to think about those things and then then a couple other questions. Where will you be on August 21st 2017. If you know already I think many of you already know. What do you already know about the total solar eclipse in August. What do you already know about this eclipse mega movie project that I'm going to tell you about and what do you hope to learn about the eclipse mega movie project. So that will help me at the end to kind of fill in and anything that I might not have covered. So you know again you could share this with someone that you're next to. I see the chat boxes going I see 14 things out of there. I don't see what they say right now but all right. And then just go ahead and share out with each other with people in your room or again in chats any of your answers. And actually I'm going to just do a quick check here on the chat. Okay I see some of you will be in Tennessee. You some many nine total solar eclipses my goodness. Several partials. Some have never seen a total solar eclipse being in Casper Wyoming Kansas. I've seen many partials but no totals. Okay fantastic. Okay thanks for sharing that some of you in the chat that helps. So we really have kind of a broad group. All right so I'm going to provide just for those of you who like summary statements. I am going to just provide a short summary. So if you came you wanted to know about the mega movie and now you got to go. This is your your chance but I hope you stay for the drawing. Okay so essentially this project is really for those of you who will be under the path of totality for so if you're going to be able to watch the total solar eclipse. It's a first of its kind citizen science project gathering scientifically valuable data from the total solar eclipse and we hope that you'll join us. I'm speaking today but really this has been and continues to be a giant team. The team is growing growing and last year December meaning a year and a month ago this was the team that convened. We now this is when Google our Google team had signed on to be part of the project and help us collect the images and and support the website development. So it's a large team. We'll talk a little bit more about that later on but I just want you to know that it's not just me doing this project. There's no way I could do this on my own. So I think many of you know already we're gonna have this total solar eclipse August 21st 2017. It passes across the entire U.S. the totality does and even partial you'll see I love this this graphic from the Great American Eclipse.com. If you haven't been there already to that website it's a great website and he's been doing these really nice graphs like this so you can grab them and share them with your audiences too. I know many of you do outreach events with the public. So you can see already that even a huge swath of the country will see up to 90% of the Sun covered. So this is really a spectacular event for our country and then we have this amazing path of the total solar eclipse traversing across the country from Oregon all the way to South Carolina and you can see that the time of totality varies from two minutes to two minutes and 40 seconds and then also it'll take about an hour and 40 minutes for that path for the shadow of the moon to move across the United States. Our eclipse mega movie project is going to kind of capitalize on this and from the path of totality we will gather images and videos of the 2017 total solar eclipse from over a thousand volunteer photographers and amateur astronomers and we really hope that you all will sign up to be some of our volunteers. We know that you already are well versed in astronomical photography and image taking and working with the public and so we're hoping this is exciting to you. We'll be gathering images and videos from members of the general public as well using an app that we're working on developing and then we're going to stitch these media assets together mostly from the volunteers to create an expanded continuous view of the total solar eclipse across the US which we're calling the movie so when we say the mega movie project this is this kind of hour and 40 minute movie across the United States we will make from images of the corona during totality and I'll talk more about that later. We will then make available to the images to the public these images that we've collected so they can anyone can take them and make art out of them or do science with them and for the scientific community we are planning to understand more about our dynamic sun through analyses of these images. Okay so this next section is to kind of explore. I'm going to explore a little bit about the history of the sun's atmosphere and also I know a lot of you know some of this content quite well and I you know if it makes sense for you and you already kind of are following along and you want to explore on your own go ahead and do that too. Zoom you can minimize the screen or make it a smaller box and you can go online and kind of do some of your own research but I'll take you or you can just watch with me so for those of you who have not been at a total eclipse I was at the total eclipse in 1979 in Oregon I grew up in Eugene Oregon and my dad was a professor chemistry professor so he took my sister and I and mom out to Oregon and I got to see a total eclipse but it was there was a lot of cloud cover and I didn't really get a great sense of the totality but this is an image taken to kind of give you a sense of what it might look like although I've been told that it doesn't actually look like this this is a picture it's spectacularly beautiful and you can our eyes have such a good dynamic range that much better than a ccd camera or even a photographic camera that it's just it'll blow you away so I'm from the folks who kind of those of you who've seen nine total eclipses I think you can probably speak to that much better than I can the sky darkens stars and planets become visible the sun's crown is visible and it's safe to look at it with the naked eye when it's at totality not before or after but when it's this when it's like this there's a kind of the sunset effect seen all around the horizon which is also kind of different and during the total eclipse of the sun the photosphere is blocked and so that's why you can see this atmosphere of the sun which is always there but it's so dim we can't see it normally and so we we call that the corona because it looks like a corona means crown and it looks kind of like a crown that a king might have worn hundred you know several hundred years ago so you can see these features these stream they're called streamers in the corona so the sun so this is a very static image but we know that the sun is very dynamic and in 1859 Carrington Richard Carrington the scientist in England was drawing pictures of these spots on the sun that are dark and kind of change and morph over time and he was drawing these pictures of these sunspots and so this is a the actual drawing that he made of these sunspots right before then this bright light came from these sunspots and just lasted I forget how long it lasted but long enough for him to see it but not it was fairly short and it was like a flare like a flare up of light and that's where that name comes from flare a solar flare and so he he he was surprised to see how fast something could change on the sun and bright in that bright of light so so that's one piece of the dynamic sun is the these flares these flares flaring up of the light coming off the sun and then there's also changes out in the corona that happened a little a little small not in the second to minute timescale but more in the minute to our timescale out in the corona and I'll show some movies of this from NASA a little bit later but I also wanted to I think this is a really interesting graphic by eddie in 1974 of all these different images of the of the of a total solar eclipse that occurred in 1860 across Europe you can see that scientists went out and they drew what they saw during these total eclipses and it was kind of the I like to think of it as the early effort at crowdsourcing coronal structural changes during a total eclipse so this is essentially what we're going to be trying to do with the mega movie with all of your support and others but not just with drawings I think drawings may end up coming in handy but we really want to get some good images from high from really good cameras as well but this was done in 1860 and you can see solar features were clearly different clearly different in different locations and the different locations were different times as well and so of totality so you can see that most likely the sun not only was there an observer bias to to the changes in the sun but there there's likely to have also been changes that occurred in the sun over time that were being documented by these by the scientists and maybe this is even a a coronal mass ejection some solar storm coming off the sun that you can see down here in 1889 frank bigelow suggested that magnetic fields could be really important in structuring these features so the people been for for thousands and thousands of years people documented this this it's likely in petroglyphs and such that these kind of features were documented of the sun there's strong suggestions that that's what these some of these petroglyph drawings were but we we don't have any kind of we don't have any indication that people had attached that to magnetism until until bigelow published his paper in 1890 about that and i was reading this alexander at all 2005 paper on kind of the history of solar understanding the solar corona so if you're a geek in terms of reading papers that's a good a good paper you can find it online for free studying the sun's corona today so one of our team members for this project is jay pasacoff he's a famous eclipse chaser as well as one of the very few people in the in the world or in the united states who study the sun by going to eclipses and doing scientific studies so these are some images that he took a difference images of images he took so he took some images and then he put them on top of each other to get the differences between of the two images to pull out the features that he was seeing and you can see that there was a coronal mass ejection which is this large solar storms propagating through space that he caught and you can see that it was you know within so this first oh no this is just in new zealand this picture on the right uh so so we know nasa i think most of you know nasa studies um the the sun here i'm going to check my time here okay good the sun's corona from space and they do that scientists from nasa do that by putting cameras out on cameras on on satellites and then they put these they block out the the bright photosphere of the sun with these discs so here's a disc and then the sun's photosphere would be this little white circle and then you can see the the handle of the that that's holding the disc in front of the camera here and so what that does is it blocks out the light and you can see this beautiful corona and then you see all these stars out in the in the background and there are different cameras that have different field of view so this is a closer in field of view and then this was the kind of this beautiful picture of the nasa data merged with a an eclipse photograph here that was very well it was analyzed very carefully with multiple images to pull out these features that you can see in the corona from the eclipse and apparently when you see it with your naked eye it looks like this image not like the kind of blurry photograph images and and by doing some really fancy techniques you can kind of recreate this uh using camera data as well so spacecraft like soho stereo they place this disc and so i wanted to show because nasa has this great data i'm going to kind of show how does how does our project kind of fit with the data that nasa is bringing in and how does it complement it so that's one reason i'm kind of just showing you some of the the nasa data so this is a really zoomed up image of a feature on the sun so if you look over here i believe this is the is the the horizon of the sun essentially so you can see this is just a maybe and sixteenth of the sun in different wavelengths so different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum and you're mostly seeing here uv extreme ultraviolet light coming from emissions from iron emissions so um what i wanted to show you is this flaring up so the flares don't only happen in visible light like what herrington saw but they happen in the ultraviolet light so they um and i'm this is important for the mega movie a little bit later uh so i just want to show you this movie so here this is um basically a swath through these images so or over time and what you're gonna see is this big flare happened pretty soon in these images so there it is the flaring up of light so see you can see it gets really really bright in these different emissions um from these different cameras that are are watching the sun from the satellite out in space this uh image right here h hmi is the magnetic imaging um so we can image magnetic fields on the sun using this zemon splitting which is a quantum effect that happens when you have magnetic fields and so the light splits you can actually then detect it from remote sensing cameras uh so so we have these these emissions coming from iron and then you have the magnetism here on the right so i just wanted to show how dynamic this our sun is and you can kind of see here these these are um this is 11 minutes 28 seconds so this happens very quickly here it's a very quick flare up okay there we go so dynamic so the sun's chromosphere and corona i've been talking a lot about the corona which is this outer atmosphere of the sun um and out there in the in the corona temperatures are very high they're much higher than on the sun so it's very different than like a um candle where the it gets it actually the sun actually gets hotter the farther you go from away from it for a little while and then it gets cooler like a candle but there's this funny region where energy um is turning into the temperature uh and heating up the atmosphere of the sun even hotter than this photosphere and the region that's really interesting the region close in that's kind of the boundary between that photosphere and the corona we call the chromosphere and that's really the important area for this eclipse work so just to remind you that uh this eclipse provides this just amazing opportunity not only to discover more about the sun but also to educate the public about science about how scientific process happens and about the just the wonder of connecting with our universe and and um it allows us to do some great outreach and just and connect with other people's to people's wonder and have people experience things for themselves so we're going to capitalize that on um capitalize on that for our mega movie project so this next section this is my last little section and i'm going to tell you a little bit about the mega movie project and how you can learn more and potentially participate so i asked where will you be on august 21st and i'm especially interested if you're going to be under the path of totality because if so then we hope you can participate in our project and we'll have even more information happening in you know in the coming months but what we would like to recommend you do is you go to our website and i'll show the slide again at the end so you'll have the the url here but it's eclipse mega dot movie or eclipse mega movie dot org or dot com or dot net anyways all of those will work to get to our website and you can sign up for the mailing list and then you'll get updates from our project so i want to tell you a little bit about some of the science that we're hoping to achieve we're trying to get some images of these bailey beads during the diamond ring time during this time since the moon has of course craters on it and so as it is starting to go to total to the to eclipse the sun completely um there's these a few uh what are called second third contacts where we see what are known as bailey's beads because mr bailey noticed them and kind of documented them and talked about them in papers scientific papers and what you see is essentially the light of the sun is able to move through the craters of the moon but not over the mountains of the sun i mean of the moon so you have this really interesting effect where you get a concentrated part of the sun's light peeking through the moon's craters and that's interesting to us because what it does is essentially the moon becomes this nice little filter for scientists to study just a little tiny chunk of the sun and allow us to get information about the brightness of that of that light kind of the color of that light the flux of it at that time and then what we can do if we get enough of that data that's really good then we can look at that information and compare it to nasa satellite images as well as some of the ground-based solar observatory images of that region of the sun and um essentially triangulate to in order to understand um if that part of the sun has moved up it can tell us more about the heliosizmology of the sun it can tell us more about the dynamics of the um of the of the convection zone that's happening just below the photosphere so there's some really interesting uh physics that can be understood from this very simple measurement and this we're we're really trying to get this um this measurement from the general public so we kind of as i said we're getting images from the general public as well as from trained volunteers so this is kind of the science that we're hoping to learn a little bit more about just from general volunteers across the clip clips path that we won't be training they'll be downloading an app that will kind of basically tell them what to do and then we'll do it for them uh if they if they if if you or they uh listen to the to the app um and it may be that we'll suggest on the website to to um get clip on cameras to their smartphones to support the scientific goals even more uh just so we we get kind of a higher resolution image of that of that bailey bead but i think probably more interesting to those of you who are on the phone on the call or on this webinar today is these 1500 volunteers and for this um the science behind this um and there's kind of two pieces to this one is the science behind it but also um this outreach movie that you could contribute to so that um if we can get some really nice images of the of the chromosphere um across this path uh then there's a possibility of us understanding the dynamics of that chromosphere better because um only during total solar eclipses can we look at the the uh chromosphere in white light down to the photosphere um so we have this great opportunity to really understand some emissions from the sun that we can't get we can get these great iron lines but we can't get some of the other bands the other lines from um from from the visible spectrum out in space because we have to block uh so much of the sun to to see past to to get the dim corona um so and there's the reason is um also because there's wobble there's enough wobbling in these spacecraft that you can't create a disc if you if you made a disc that perfectly covered the photosphere of the sun and the satellite you can't keep the satellite uh still enough essentially to um to have it continually cover the sun so that's the reason why and then we what we hope to do is create a movie with all these images so this is a little graphic that i did um where you can kind of see these different images that would be coming from the different regions uh and so what i want to do is show you so we're going to then patch all these images together um and create a movie and this is not what our movie's going to look like but what i want to show you is a movie from nasa uh that does show some really cool features of the sun and the chromosphere and the corona but i'm going to show this movie to you for two reasons one is to three reasons one is because it's just super cool two is because um you'll see that there's a region that nasa has a hard time um kind of covering with their cameras and the eclipse the total solar eclipse will get that area very nicely and um so there'll be some science we can do in that region and then also um it might just help you kind of imagine what the movie could look like that we're going to produce with our mega movie um okay so here's our here's our uh nasa movie so you can see a very dynamic um features happening there off the off the edge of the sun and what you see you have some acro a chroma mass ejection being emitted this big solar storm coming off the sun in fact there are a couple of them in there and um and there's another one so you can see how far reaching these uh these features are now with the with eclipse we could actually i mean we're we're hitting solar minimum um so the probability of having a coronal mass ejection is low but um still could happen and also there are all these really interesting small features that happen um along the sun's surface uh right on the edge of the sun so here you can see like there's the coronal mass ejection that's being emitted here but then you also have these features these prominences which i know you all are very familiar with um and those can change uh over time as i'm also sure you're very familiar with uh being amateur astronomers so um we're really interested in how does that change over this hour and 40 minutes of this path of totality and how does that then also um end up either either leading to some eruptions off the sun or or to some other uh dynamic features of the sun so this is kind of hot off the press um so don't you know you can write it down but just know that it could get modified a bit over the next month um but as of today this is what we're expecting people would need to do this um to be part of the volunteer work uh a camera dslr digital single lens reflex camera um a telephoto zoom lens but we don't want it to zoom too much because we really need to um see the whole especially for the movie component we want to see the entire chromosphere and corona even maybe so minimum focal length of 300 millimeters um so for those of you who think more in terms of degrees of sky which are probably most of you four and a half degrees of the sky um and you can calculate uh asp found this beautiful um calculator online uh if you want to calculate the field of view for your particular dslr and lenses and then a stable and level tripod of course and then what we really also want is gps unit um both for the timing aspects because if we're going to do any um we'll both for the movie to patch the images together in the correct sequence but also for the scientific analysis that we want to do um both the gps uh to know where you are located and also um the timing of your when your images were taken to a very high um very high resolution so those would be very useful to us our new website we launched uh last month so again i talked to you about that a little bit and that's we'll be um updating that as we go and um so google's making and science team is uh the the kind of small team within google that's really um uh joined this project and in many ways are helping lead the project multiverse my this group i'm leading at uc berkeley our main um you know we really love science and uh science education and we um and the wonder of space and earth science and we really also want to bring all all americans into that um endeavor and then we have all these wonderful partners asp um oh you can read all of these folks i'm going to go through since i'm done so here again's our mega movie and we hope you participate all right i'm going to stop share or do i should i stop sharing brian or yeah i'd say stop sharing okay and i'll take it from there but stay on because it's great to see you yeah that was fantastic laura thank you so much there are so many um questions in the chat one that's come up a couple of times is will this presentation be available and um it will be i am going to now try and share my screen and show you where that is um let's just uh just a real quick while you're doing that i just want to mention that i do i just need to um send the powerpoint presentation to the mega movie team one more time to just make sure that it can all be shared but but most of it will be shared if not all of it yes great so i think now you might be seeing my screen if any look um uh is it moving or it looks like it stopped sharing let's go to the end okay i see it okay great so this is it will be on the main uh nightstand network webinar page for this webinar um you will this is just a link to it right now i'm not logged in um but that is where you'll find this webinar it probably any day now a couple of days well then we have this uh youtube video up it probably by the end of the week and um so you can share this with anyone you like um all of the webinars that we do are um are on youtube and also on the nightstand network website so um there are lots more questions and we are going to get to those if you have questions uh go to the q and a if you go to the bottom of your screen you should find a little um link that says q and a and uh type them in there and then we'll make sure to get them sometimes in chat they get lost so i just want to tell you i am Vivian White for those of you i don't know um and i am i help run the night sky network with Dave prosper and brian cruz and um we're here at the ASP and i just wanted to give you a little bit of a heads up about what you can expect from us around the eclipse we are working really hard to get to things that you've said that you'll need so i want to give you first just the link to if you are on the night sky network website and you look up eclipse um you will find uh all of these resources here i'm just going to scroll down um one thing that we have on there is a postcard so these postcards have been super popular i think you can see them if i put it up here but you can also see i'm sharing it on my screen it's a postcard that you punch a hole in the center of and it becomes a pinhole projector of course you can do that with anything but this one in particular has a lot of information about what you might want to use to see the eclipse you can see here also on the screen that i'm sharing it's editable so you can put your club's information on there and then print these out um if you printed a professional postcard place they often will be able to punch the holes in there for you um and it's it has recommendations on there of what size of three millimeter eighth of an inch hole uh to do that so that's one thing we're going to um we'll be sending you quite a few of those but you can also print some yourself um we are sending out eclipse tool kits to all the clubs who have hand or more events posted for 2017 on the night sky network website so those will be in there um lots of other things will be in there um also on that same page that i showed you you'll be getting um at least one of these uh widewood clips as they happen also known as the yardstick eclipse one of the perennial favorite late sky network activities this was a marnie barrenson activity i believe it comes with we've created a simple card to show um uh use questioning strategies to ask people about eclipses and get them involved and then we made little earths we've been really busy making lots and lots of earths um it's been really fun but you'll get some of those in your eclipse box as well um also back to this let me see if i can switch here um i'm going to stop sharing and share a different screen quickly there is on the resource page that i was showing you there is this presentation um and it is how um it's called an eclipse to remember and it is designed for those of you who are not on the path of totality um to give to your communities to tell them about what's going on um to tell them what they can expect what what eclipses are so their their overview is there what eclipses are about what to expect of a partial eclipse what you might get to see in a total eclipse if they can make it there and then lots and lots of resources for viewing it wherever you are so definitely talks about how to project things safely how to use filters um and what you know what a solar eclipse might look like it's got video and audio you can use or you don't have to use them it also had lots of links uh oh and then um along with some extensions at the end we've got viewing resources for every place um this bit.ly.ms i mean slash nsn eclipse this is where you can it's the short link to finding all those resources i just showed you on the night's venue network but also this nasa link down here is going to be have a lot of resources for you coming up about the eclipse let me just stop and share back to where i was let's see i've got it okay um so the nasa night's game network i'm jumping around a little bit here i realized but it's all kind of intertwined so this is the nasa total eclipse website and on there you'll find in this toolkit downloadables so these downloadables are fact sheets and posters and information cards and brochures and things like that they have nasa has very kindly printed out a lot a lot of a lot of these for amateur astronomy clubs so in your eclipse packet you'll be getting many copies of each of these um uh so you can print these yourselves but also you just wanted to send them to you so you have them on hand um trying to think if there's anything else that i want to cover i think that that is really about it oh we are um one other thing that we are just getting ready to put together um we have uh these small uh business cards that you can give out while you are at while you're on the path of totality we know that most of you are going to be traveling to the path of totality so it doesn't help to give them information about your club back in your home community but this will um show them how to get on the night sky network and find a club in their area to get people more engaged in astronomy clubs that's that's my job is to get more people engaged in astronomy clubs um and i think this is just such a great PTO moment and a great opportunity to interest people in astronomy and and this is an easy way for them to follow up so i think that that's all i have i'm looking around my very piled desk at all the doodads that we're sending out and i think that that is most of them so i am going to i'm happy to take any questions as well on the q and a feel free to um hop in there i'm gonna stop sharing now and see if brian wants to hop back on there he is yeah yeah i also wanted to mention that uh we are working on uh we haven't quite figured out what it is but uh one of the things that amateur astronomers like is to be recognized for uh doing things it's kind of like turning boy scout merit badges or girl scout badges and girl scouts and i know that pins are terribly popular and we haven't quite figured out what the recognition item is going to be that everyone will get for uh participating in this but we're working on something so that when you're out there taking photos that people will go to look and say oh yeah you know he's doing a mega move so i would also add one more thing i forgot yeah i didn't um include in the eclipse packages that we are sending to you our glasses because part of this mega movie will be distributing glasses to clubs so stay tuned for how we're going to do that it's a very easy distribution method so you'll be able to order um glasses and for those of you who are helping with the mega movie um as the 1500 volunteers you can uh you'll be able to send glasses to your club um back at home so that'll be part that's coming up again the um night sky network eclipse packages that we're sending out will probably be going out in mid february so there's been a bit of a delay on our end and nothing we could do about it so we are um those are coming out fairly soon so keep an eye out for that um but and the eclipse glasses will be not long after that so okay yeah well we had a few questions i want to go kind of back to a couple of the ones that we we answered here i mean a lot of times um you know people might not have noticed these and that they got answered by text but melvin asked would it be better to make video or images or still images of the corona for this so laura yeah so um it's a great question and it's a question that we continue to revisit on our team um our answer continues to be that we're really looking for images um primarily the two reasons one is um scientifically they're easier to handle uh when we want to do analysis with them and we are hoping that from the volunteers uh that we'll do some flat fielding of your cameras so we can kind of detect the background um counts on your ccd in your camera and then we'll be able to uh subtract that from the images themselves so we can get a really good um we could basically turn the counts on your ccds to to fluxes to photon flux um so that we can then do some real scientific analyses with it and so for the scientists we're really the we're really looking for the images however for the and for the mega movie i think it'll be easier to piece together images um from different sites but we also recognize how spectacular some of the movies are going to be and the video could be from some of your sites and so we are trying to figure out what do we do with those and do we collect them and do we um provide a place for you all to share them with one another um so we don't have a good so i guess the answer is images but we we see the value of the video and we haven't come up with how to deal with those that value yet in terms of managing it so so stay tuned so stay tuned and if you have ideas that you'd like um yeah to provide we we're happy there's a lot of wisdom in this group and a lot of wisdom and experience in this group yes i know um and steward asks and this is something that i know that uh is is you know clearly you know in february 1979 i got clattered out with the total solar eclipse it got really really dark for several minutes but uh it was cloudy actually it was snowing where i was so it's so steward asks how do you plan on dealing with the uh inevitable gaps in coverage you know and this might be you know uh because the train is too rugged to get in there there's no roads or maybe it's uh you know inclement weather right um so the question is just about avoiding weather or gaps in coverage how do you deal with the gaps in that uh 300 miles where there's no images or more right right no and i guess right so so the question the way i had answered it was how are we going to try to get the best coverage possible which is we're going to try to kind of get local folks involved across this path of totality as well as provide incentives for folks to travel to where um we see there are gaps um however in terms of the there will be gaps because of what you just described like there will be bad weather across some of the path and um and and we'll just deal with that in the way that we normally do with uh so for the movie um we'll be kind of hand picking the images we'll be putting into the the mega movie so that we'll have something that's really very dynamic and interesting as some of you had mentioned I saw in the chat um the corona can change very slowly especially to turn solar minimum so it might be a really boring movie um but hopefully it won't and we we have some ideas on how to make it for the outreach component to make it a little more interesting if there aren't some features that can be seen easily but in terms of the gap uh we will it will just we'll either extrapolate the data through that um you know from images across the 300 kilometer or miles um or we'll just just acknowledge it's a gap in our data um and in the movie I mean it's a good question we have not determined how like what we'll do there some of our team members really want it to be time wise very accurate and so in that case it would just be blank and uh if we couldn't get coverage you know across the width either as well as the length um then I guess it would be blank if we were just keeping it very time accurate uh or we might turn it if we might make it a little more um artistic or put in a kind of a blank place that says you know skipped a data gap so that we're still again I'm trying to sort through that and again we would love um if anyone wants I think we'll you know our volunteers which I imagine some of you will be hopefully uh will will become part of our team and so you will get to provide input into so Barry asked an interesting question and I'm going to kind of expand on on this a little bit because this is one of the things that we've been kind of debating in the uh equipment group and what equipment is going to be you know appropriate and he asked about using a hydrogen alpha scope with a high speed black and white camera to generate some things but I want to expand that and think about that if someone is intending on taking photos through a telescope that has adequate field of view would that be acceptable as well as the DSLR images? Yes yes absolutely and I think it's really a matter of the field of view um because what we're going to have to do I mean for the movie what we'll have to do is resize some of the images so that we we get you know so we have the right size of the sun um moon uh on the image and so really any system that can give kind of a good a good image will will work um there's something else I wanted to say about that oh the H right H alpha um so yeah we've had some really cool questions about that before and like we definitely from a scientific perspective absolutely would love to collect that data um how we'll tag it and if we're gonna like I know some of you actually do fits files and such which would be marvelous um and so uh but we haven't kind of figured out how we'll tag it in terms of um different filters but I know there are some gonna be some amazing filtered images coming in and we definitely would love that and in fact that would even make now that I'm thinking about it just right now that could make the movie interesting as well to kind of have a multi filtered movie over time so Peter asks a interesting question that this is um you know this might be a solution to our gap problem he says uh might NASA deploy and I know that your google in this case uh deploy some aircraft to fly above the weather to cover some of those weather or maybe terrain gaps right no it's a really good question in fact um the national science foundation because I don't know how much of you know about the national science foundation but they fund a lot of the plane airplane work um and ground-based work and so um they do have a plane they have funded an airplane to fly along the path of totality and um one of the co-principal investigators on that project is also a mega movie project team member so we have access to some of that data also NASA so yep um has funded some outreach groups to launch balloons and we've talked to the folks who are running the balloon program and trying to figure out how to get good data from them uh the problem with that is that they're probably going to be kind of wobbly the pointing issues might be a little more difficult but we're in conversations with them as well so that would be another gap a potential way to cover the gaps that's right very nice so harry notes uh that there's also the the citizen kate project which is working on some coverage he mentions video and i know that they're also doing some other sterile imagery and it's a it's a different project is there any synergy that's going on between this project and citizen kate yeah absolutely and in fact um matt got his idea from hearing one of our mega movie folks present at a conference and he was like oh that's a great idea but what if i did something even more kind of constrained in terms of um more of a a scientific experiment using all the same equipment across the path so so what's really nice about his project is a compliments ours in that he'll have calibrated data um from from identical systems 60 of them across the path and so he'll have this beautiful data set that isn't as well doesn't have the coverage that our project has but it has um it has some other benefits to it and so i think having the two data sets is really i mean it makes for a good case for some really cool science that can be done okay um greg asks here and i'm not quite sure what the whole question is he says that he has a sony um camcorder that he's going to be using and it gives eight mp stills from the video and uh i'm guessing that the question is is would those be something that would be useful for uh to submit as individual images towards the movie yeah no i think i mean it's so amazing the technology that's available now that i mean that's one reason this is a once one of its kind projects is simply the technology that exists today um yes that sounds like a lovely camera and if if you don't want it when you're done i'll take it i'm just kidding no that sounds great yeah we would love to get images from there and then robert asks a question and i know that this is something that uh becomes an issue for a lot of astrophotography in general um what kind of method uh that you're gonna that we're gonna need for flat fielding in the camera or whether it's even necessary in this instance yeah we will from the volunteers we do have a flat fielding approach that we're going to take and um one of our science team members wrote up what that procedure is going to look like and i don't have it memorized but we um have a procedure for that and then the volunteers will get trained on it so that um we have some good consistency across okay kind of make a note on that too just so everybody knows we will be um once the 1500 volunteers are selected to do the real dslr images um we'll be offering trainings and those will be available online and you'll be able to test out your equipment to see if it um you see if you're able to take these images so um there will be lots more information coming on that yeah so i suspect that most of the photographers who are going to be doing this have greater expertise at this than i do and most of us on the team um but i think that what the idea of the the training is going to be not that that you know when it comes to doing some of this photography there's very little that i can teach people um but i think the mainly it's getting some consistency so that we're getting consistent images from coast to coast so that we get useful images you know we know uh how we want things time-stamped and how we want things gps stamped and things like that so that's going to be one of the big uh foci of the um of the trainings that we do yeah that's a really good point brane yeah and i really think we can we can capitalize on a lot i mean this project i like to talk about this project being by the people for the people um because there's so much expertise out there and especially in this community that even our team doesn't have so we're really and we have like one or two people who kind of provide some input but if we put all the brains on this call together it's gonna it's vast yes yes i i think that we do it you know sometimes we we get groups together and it's more like pooling our ignorance than anything else i think that this is the exact opposite we have way more information and expertise than what we really need but uh you know it's it's uh trying to figure out you know just exactly what we need to uh produce something really really cool so well thank you very much laura and vivian and so we've uh run out of questions here and we're about at the top of the hour and uh and uh i think it's time for a book raffle and so let me refresh my memory about some of the closing things and so uh to remind you that this webinar along with all the others will be posted on our youtube channel and also you can find uh eventually when we get the slides from laura and uh vivians for sure will be there and a link to the youtube page the video on the youtube page will be on the outreach resources page for this webinar on the nsn website