Biology

SunSketcher, a smartphone app developed by WKU faculty and students as part of a NASA-funded citizen science project to capture images of the total solar eclipse on April 8, is available in the App Store for iOS devices and on Google Play for Android devices.

Volunteers in 12 states along the path of totality will use the app to record eclipse images of Baily’s Beads (bright points of sunlight that briefly appear as light penetrates the lunar valleys around the edge of the moon) and transmit those images to WKU for analysis to measure the size and shape of the Sun. (Download the iOS app; download the Android app)

The path of totality from Texas to Maine includes cities like Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas; Little Rock, Arkansas; Paducah, Kentucky; Indianapolis, Evansville and Bloomington, Indiana; Cleveland and Akron, Ohio; Erie, Pennsylvania; Buffalo, New York; Burlington, Vermont; and Caribou, Maine.

Physics & Astronomy Professor Gordon Emslie is the project’s lead investigator with Professors Greg Arbuckle and Michael Galloway from the School of Engineering & Applied Sciences and Professors Leah Moss and Mark Simpson in the Department of Art & Design. Dr. Hugh Hudson from the University of Glasgow in Scotland is Science Advisor to the project.

About 10 WKU students have been involved with various aspects of the SunSketcher project, including writing app code, managing data transfer and storage, image processing, website development, and public relations.

For more about SunSketcher, visit the project website at http://sunsketcher.org/ or NASA’s SunSketcher page at https://science.nasa.gov/citizen-science/sunsketcher/

Contact: Dr. Gordon Emslie, gordon.emslie@wku.edu