For the third time in the last several years, a team from Ideum will be traveling to capture images from a total solar eclipse. Our team is headed to southern Texas in April to photograph the event and to share some results with our partners. We will share images (weather permitting) on Instagram and later on our website.

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Back in 2017, Ideum first developed interactive software for mobile devices that allowed users to capture images and share them with NASA scientists. In that year we traveled to Western Nebraska to capture the event. In 2019, we traveled to Argentina to photograph the total eclipse with a new version of the application. 

While we didn’t develop any new software for this eclipse event, we are excited to learn that the SunSketcher initiative, sponsored by NASA, is using some of our source code for their citizen science project this year. As they describe, “At its core, SunSketcher is an app anyone can use to photograph the 2024 Great North American Eclipse. Mass participation will generate an incredible database of images that, when analyzed together, could allow scientists to map the Sun.”  This initiative, and others, were mentioned this past weekend in the Washington Post, see: What this solar eclipse can teach us about our planet and beyond.

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We will also be participating in the Eclipse Megamovie project, also sponsored by NASA. We’ve been collaborating with them on the last few eclipse expeditions. 

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In addition, we will be trying out a Kickstarter telescope device called Hestia, due to arrive any day now. This interesting device, the hardware equivalent of our initial software projects, attempts to greatly simplify image capturing on a mobile device. We will also report back on how this interesting piece of technology works out.

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We are excited at the prospect of witnessing and sharing this amazing phenomenon yet again. If you’d like to know more about the eclipse and how to safely view it, please visit NASA’s Eclipse 2024 website.

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