Episode 70 | Eclipse Megamovie 2024 and Rethinking Science Education

The 2024 solar eclipse is upon us! Tune in for a fascinating conversation with Dr. Laura Peticolas, principle investigator and project lead for the Eclipse Megamovie 2024, to learn about the eclipse, how she and her team are rethinking science education, and the impact of connection. 

Special thanks to our sponsor:

UltraCamp

Show notes:

• Eclipse Megamovie 2024
• EdEon - Sonoma State University
• SunSketcher
• Eclipse Megamovie 2017

Where Do Solar Jets Go?

Eclipse Megamovie 2024

Eclipse Megamovie 2024 (EM2024) is funded by NASA to discover the secret lives of solar jets and plumes. Many jets and plumes seem to disappear or change from the time they are formed on the Sun and when they move out into the solar wind. To learn more about these solar phenomena, we will use photographs taken by volunteers to identify solar jets as they leave the Sun's surface and solar plumes as they grow and develop. We aim for our research efforts to provide some clues or answers to this question.

What is a solar jet?

A solar jet, or solar spicule, is a transient, jet-like feature in the Sun's atmosphere. They are narrow streams of plasma that erupt from the solar surface, reaching high speeds and extending thousands of kilometers into the corona. Solar jets are relatively small and short-lived, lasting only a few minutes. They are thought to be caused by magnetic reconnection, a process where intersecting magnetic field lines rearrange and release energy. These jets are important for understanding solar phenomena, as they contribute to heating the solar corona and accelerating the solar wind. They are also significant in the study of space weather, which can impact satellite and communication systems on Earth. Solar jets are typically observed using space-based solar observatories.

Why don’t we know as much about solar jets and plasma plumes as we do everything else about the sun?

Solar Jets and Plasma Plumes have been “hidden” behind necessary instrumentation discs on satellites used by NASA. The discs are used to protect “white-light” cameras onboard a satellite from the bright solar photosphere. These cameras are used to study the outer solar corona in the visible wavelengths. The inner corona is thus blocked, making it hard to study the evolution and motions of these plasma jets and plumes. Jets and plumes can be observed leaving the solar photosphere but then NASA has only had limited ability to track their motion off the Sun into the solar wind. Satellite cameras, like those on SOHO satellite, can pick up any jets that make it out to their field of view. But the jets that don’t make it that far cannot be studied. Ground-based solar telescopes can study these features by looking at their green emissions, which can get past the atmosphere. Other visible colors emitted from the scattered photospheric light off these features are blocked by the atmosphere, but are important for understanding the plasma jet and plumes’ densities and perhaps their evolution.

Using the citizen science python competition platform Kaggle Community Competitions with volunteer photographers interested in coding and/or data analysts who want to explore and characterize solar transient plasma flows and jets, we will lead an image processing competition using Eclipse Megamovie python codes created in the past 5 years together with emergent AI systems, processed EM2024 images in FITS files, and NASA SDO/ AIA and SOHO/LASCO data.

Thanks to improved calibration, equipment, training, and software processes, we will improve on the 2017 movie (solar min) and compare it to the 2024 movie (solar max). It is anticipated