The Citizen CATE (Continental-America Telescope Eclipse) Experiment to Observe the 2017 Great American Eclipse

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This proposal requests support for the Citizen Central-America Telescope Eclipse (CATE) experiment. Citizen CATE is a program to observe the total solar eclipse that will track across the United States on August 21, 2017 from 60 locations distributed along the path of totality. Total solar eclipse crossings of the United States are relatively rare events; the last time a total solar eclipse crossed the Continental U.S. from the Atlantic to the Pacific was June 18, 1918. While a total solar eclipse lasts only a few minutes at any one particular location, Citizen CATE will have 60 identical sites manned by trained citizen-science volunteers. The goal of the experiment is to produce a continuous white-light movie of the inner solar corona for a period of about 90 minutes. The resulting data set will provide a scientific resource to further study the dynamics of the corona, and an educational resource for the training of future researchers and for outreach to the general public. The academic partners that will be involved in the Citizen CATE experiment are drawn from a geographically and demographically diverse set of institutions. These diverse partners will, in turn, reach out to an even broader audience from small rural events to international broadcasts viewed by thousands. Never before have the continuous observations of the inner solar corona like those proposed by the Citizen CATE project been performed. Some of the areas of solar research that will be addressed by such a data set include: the study of polar plume dynamics, measurement of the coronal potential field, examination of the relationship between coronal smoke rings and Rayleigh-Taylor instabilities, the search for active-region loop oscillations, and the search for the signatures of coronal inflows. After the eclipse, the CATE data will be transmitted back to a central location at the PIs institution, the National Solar Observatory in Boulder, CO, for further processing and distribution to the scientific community for further research. A quick-look movie of the Citizen CATE results will also be made available to the general public on the day of the eclipse. The CATE data will open a new window on the inner solar corona and will provide valuable context data for future eclipse studies. Because the equipment that is used by the volunteers for the eclipse observations will stay with the institutions, the project will have lasting effects on STEM education well beyond the 2017 event. Students from across the country will be engaged in solar physics and astronomy research and education. The project will, thus, serve to inspire and train the next generation of astronomers.