5 Citizen Science Projects for August Eclipse
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- A total solar eclipse on 12 August will sweep over parts of Europe and the Arctic and Atlantic oceans, with a partial eclipse visible across much of Europe, Canada, north-west Africa and parts of the US
- The shadow bands project asks observers in the path of totality to film a white sheet or piece of cardboard with a camera, aiming to quantify how the bands differ by altitude and distance from the centre of totality
- The SunSketcher smartphone app automatically captures Baily's Beads during the eclipse; combined with a map of lunar topography, the geolocated photos yield an extraordinarily precise measurement of how close the sun's disc is to a perfect circle
- The Gaia4Sustainability project uses sensor rigs that measure sky brightness and meteorological factors year-round to track light pollution, and the same devices can record atmospheric changes caused by the blocked sunlight
- The Sungrazer project lets volunteers download satellite images of the sun and scan its outskirts for moving objects like sun-grazing comets—a method the article notes has already discovered a huge proportion of all known comets
- The Dynamic Eclipse Broadcast (DEB) Initiative trains and equips teams to observe the sun's corona across the path of totality, but 2026 sign-ups are already closed; volunteers can register now for the 2027 eclipse sweeping over northern Africa
Why it matters: A total eclipse is visible from somewhere on Earth only every ~18 months, and for European observers the next chance after August is the 2027 totality over northern Africa—so the 12 August window is a rare shot at feeding real data into projects on solar shape, atmospheric dynamics, and comet discovery using little more than a smartphone, a bedsheet, or a laptop.
