As millions look to the sky on April 8 hoping for a view of the total eclipse, scientists will be racing to glean as much data as they can. They’ll have help from ̽̽ Catamounts who see another opportunity: bringing the public onboard as learners – or as citizen scientists themselves.
, or community science, entails involving members of the public in some of the most fundamental aspects of the scientific process: making observations and collecting data. From backyards and schoolyards to city parks and national parks, citizen scientists in every corner of the world submit their findings to databases, websites and apps. Scientists then access this crowdsourced data to create new knowledge.
And there’ll be plenty of data to gather come April 8.
Hazel Wilkins, who graduated from ̽̽ in December 2023 (dual bachelor’s in physics and mathematics), is leading citizen scientists in data collection on Eclipse Day.
is a NASA- and NSF-partnered project wherein citizen scientists will fan out across the U.S. path of totality (the locations where the moon will entirely block the sun), from Texas to Maine, telescopes and cameras in tow. Their goal: to take advantage of the moon blotting out the sun’s light, leaving its outer atmosphere, or corona, visible for a few fleeting moments.
Those couple minutes of totality are enough, Wilkins says, to allow the teams to take a series of photographs. Each team will snap away from the moment the moon hides the sun until the first sliver of sunlight peaks out the other side, capturing eclipse images from the hills of Texas to the Green Mountains of Vermont and the coast of Maine. These images will form a 90-minute timelapse of the coronal plasma’s movement as it spouts off the sun, splashes into other bursts of plasma, forms loops, breaks apart, and disappears back into the swirling mass of molten solar surface.
Watching this will likely be mesmerizing, in a lava-lamp sort of way. But understanding it is also scientifically crucial, Wilkins says. “The importance of our research is to further our understanding of the dynamics of the sun’s outer layers in order to help us predict space weather events, specifically solar flares, which release a large amount of electromagnetic radiation.” Solar flares can disrupt communications and other technological systems on Earth, Wilkin adds, and “predicting solar activity is crucial to providing warnings and mitigating potential risks to technology and infrastructure on Earth and in space.”
It’s a tall order, even for the astronomy enthusiasts who’ve signed up for the job, but Wilkins, Northeast Lead Trainer on the project, has already received instruction at The Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, and knows how to operate the astronomy equipment the volunteers in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont will use as darkness falls on the afternoon of April 8. Now, Wilkins is back in New England, prepping her teams to capture a few crucial minutes of that coronal dance – the last in that 90-minute timelapse –– before the shadow of totality disappears over the North Atlantic.
In the tradition of citizen scientists, Citizen CATE’s volunteers will be grabbing up crucial data when and where it’s available, Wilkins says, providing it for needed applications. "Predicting solar flares with high precision remains a complex challenge today, and Citizen CATE’s research will take us one step closer to achieving this.”
The data will go to scientists scattered across the world, but the astronomy equipment used to collect it will remain in these path-of-totality communities, contributing to science education for years to come.
Wilkins credits ̽̽ Senior Physics Lecturer John Perry for her involvement in the project. She took nearly every class Perry taught, later acting as his teaching assistant.
“He always gave me the knowledge to talk about astronomy, pursue further knowledge of it, and feel really confident in it,” Wilkins says, adding, “Women in STEM historically, and to this day, experience tremendous discrimination. What I appreciated about John was, he took the time to foster women students’ confidence and knowledge.” When Perry learned of the Citizen CATE employment opportunity, he shared it with Wilkins. She applied and was thrilled to be selected for the role.
Photo by NASA
The Advantage of an Event Like This
For ̽̽ Senior Information Technology Professional Scott Turnbull, public science outreach has been a pursuit spanning decades. “I think too many people think science is magic or fiction,” he says. “I've always wanted to help people understand how science works.” An active member of , Turnbull remembers being enthralled by NASA’s 1960s Apollo missions, and he has long channeled that enthusiasm into informal science education, having done STEM outreach with schools and youth organizations since the 1990s. Since 2018, Turnbull has volunteered as a , speaking to communities across Vermont about all things space. He loves the gig: he explains fascinating topics; he sends audiences home with NASA-provided bookmarks, stickers, and other reminders of how cool science is; and he preps for it all by asking NASA engineers about their jobs (often in service of hyping those jobs to the next generation of STEM workers).
Now, with the eclipse quickly approaching, Turnbull finds his calendar filling up with requests to speak at local libraries and ̽̽’s April 1 Vermont Space Fair, with fellow Solar System Ambassadors.
Of course, Turnbull gets a boost from the topic at hand.
“When I show people a view of Saturn in a telescope, you can see that it is demonstrably a ball, and it does have the famous rings,” he says. “It looks just like a cartoon, but it's not a picture in a book or online; the only thing between you and Saturn is space,” he says. “The light of the sun bounced off that planet and came to your eye. There's no electronics, no editing, no enhancing.” The sight typically evokes shouts of amazement from the person peering into the lens. Turnbull has witnessed this moment of discovery and delight hundreds of times and hasn’t tired of it yet.
Such experiences are striking and universal – a fantastic introduction to the wonders of science, Turnbull says. And this eclipse’s timing removes barriers.
“Maybe that's the advantage of an event like this one: it's happening in the middle of the day,” Turnbull notes. He adds, “The eclipse is sort of a loss leader – I’ll talk with people about this event that's going to take three minutes on April 8. And once someone has that first conversation about science, they’re interested, and maybe they request a talk from me or another NASA Solar System Ambassador; they begin to spend time learning about science.”
In the meantime, Turnbull says, he’ll keep handing out that NASA swag and sharing the importance of science – including at ̽̽’s recent Aiken Discover Engineering event. “That's the consistent drumbeat we need,” Turnbull says. “We need folks to stay interested in what can be a hard career.”
3:26 pm on April 8 will find Turnbull with a VAS colleague (sporting needed solar safety glasses, of course), standing among telescopes and sky-gazers, behind Jericho’s Deborah Rawson Memorial Library, “doing my best to narrate the sequence of events, from first contact through total eclipse.”
Wilkins, meanwhile, is already looking beyond this eclipse to a science career. She’s submitted applications to Data Science and Astronomy graduate programs. “I think it is crucial that we as humans learn as much as we can about the place we call home, our solar system,” she says. “Understanding our cosmic neighborhood inspires human exploration and fuels our desire to venture beyond our home planet.” She adds, “I feel privileged to have an opportunity to look further into the star that allows our species to thrive.”
For more information about ̽̽ eclipse activities, how to watch the eclipse safely, and to access a list of eclipse happenings across Vermont, please visit ̽̽’s site. Read more about ̽̽ experts’ plans for April 8 here.
