Citizen CATE 2024 (Citizen Continental-America Telescopic Eclipse 2024 experiment)

Join us for the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse! We are looking for about 35 teams along the path of totality to learn how to use solar telescopes to collect data during the eclipse. Afterward, your community will keep the telescope for use as a free community resource. Click “join” to indicate your interest in applying to be one of the teams selected to receive an honorarium, training, and equipment to participate.

During the total solar eclipse on August 21st in 2017, the original Citizen Continental America Telescopic Eclipse (Citizen CATE) Experiment placed 68 stations with identical cameras, telescopes, and supporting equipment along the entire path of totality in the US. Operated by community participant teams, CATE successfully captured a continuous 90-minute movie of the inner corona in white light. Evolving from 2017, the next-generation CATE 2024 will use new teams to make observations of the inner and middle solar corona in polarized white light along the entire 60-minute path of totality within the US.

This project will help scientists learn more about the structure and physics of the magnetic field and plasma in the solar corona. With this data, we hope to understand how the magnetic field evolves, connects different parts of the corona, and how it is responsible for heating the corona to millions of degrees (much hotter than the surface of the sun!) and giving rise to the solar wind.

Participating communities will be able to keep the equipment as a community resource for the future, along with educational curricula and invitations to participate in analysis of the scientific data and co-authorship on the scientific papers.