RHESSI and the Megamovie
From RHESSI Wiki
Revision as of 21:58, 30 July 2017
| Nugget | |
|---|---|
| Number: | 304 |
| 1st Author: | Hugh Hudson, Laura Peticolas, |
| 2nd Author: | and Juan Carlos Martinez Oliveros |
| Published: | 31 July 2017 |
| Next Nugget: | RHESSI and the Megamovie |
| Previous Nugget: | Bastille Day 2017 |
| List all | |
Contents |
Introduction
One of RHESSI's remarkable scientific contributions has been its determination of the oblateness of the Sun by use of its Solar Aspect Sensors [1]. Except in the most general of links via solar magnetism, the dynamo, etc., this has little to do with RHESSI's main scientific objectives, but the result really flowed from the RHESSI design philosophy of rotation and high-bandwidth aspect determination.
Now we can take another step forward, thanks to the remarkable total solar eclipse that is coming up on August 21. As should be well-known to all by now, the path of totality for this eclipse extends across the whole of the continental US, from Oregon to South Carolina, and takes an hour and a half to do this. Thus in principle we have a chance to watch coronal development - with the unique advantages that an eclipse brings - for this whole time. The resulting data cube, massive and complicated, we term the "Eclipse Megamovie" and have teamed with Google to make it possible. The purpose of this Nugget is just to make sure that all members of our readership here know that they can participate at any level they wish to; for serious camera buffs, there is a team of volunteers - well more than a thousand at the time of writing - who agree to contribute their raw images to the Megamovie database, which will be public-access and also, we hope, the basis of many citizen-science projects in the best Berkeley tradition. For those uninterested in photography, but with a smartphone equipped with camera and GPS, we can also make excellent scientific use of the data to follow up on the RHESSI oblateness measurement.
The eclipse
Figure 1 shows a snapshot of
The app
References
[1] "A Large Excess in Apparent Solar Oblateness Due to Surface Magnetism"
| RHESSI Nugget Date | 31 July 2017 + |
| RHESSI Nugget First Author | Hugh Hudson, Laura Peticolas, + |
| RHESSI Nugget Index | 304 + |
| RHESSI Nugget Second Author | and Juan Carlos Martinez Oliveros + |
