How do these features in the solar corona, this atmosphere of the Sun,
how do those change?
Sometimes they escape from the Sun. Sometimes they go back towards the Sun.
And that region is hard to really study.
And we're going to get this little glimpse from Earth.
My name is Laura Peticolas,
and I am the principal investigator for the Eclipse Megamovie 2024 project.
So, what's really unique about the eclipse, especially one like the one coming up,
is that it's covering a very large path on land.
And that means a lot of observers
can be viewing it over an extended period of time.
In this case, we are able to take images along that entire path in ways
that you can't just do from one location on Earth or one location in space.
And that gives us this really unique dataset.
In 2017, we made a movie of all the images.
This time, we know how to make the movie more dynamic
and we're going to have more exposures, meaning that we'll be able
to see more of the features in the solar corona than we were before.
And, although it's maybe not what one might think in terms of a movie,
in terms of people and a plot, but for us solar physicists,
it is very exciting to see
even the smallest changes in the corona at the timescale we're going to get.