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On August 21st, 2017, a Sun eclipse became visible across the USA, from Oregon to South Carolina and millions of people watched it and many took photos. The most spectacular part of the eclipse is when the Moon covers the Sun and the corona becomes visible flaming in the black sky.
It is a fleeting moment, a few tens of seconds and then the corona disappears behind the Moon as the Sun rises on the other side. However, that fleeting moment has repeated over and over for the hour and a half that it took to cast the Moon shadow from the Pacific to the Atlantic coast of the US.
Google decided to solicit scientists first and then everyone wishing to participate to share their photos of the corona and then stitched them all together.
12,300 people participated providing over 46,000 photos. You can watch the result in the clip. Actually, the clip will continue to be refined and updated as new photos are submitted to Google. You can see the latest here.
I found intriguing this initiative. It is not about technology. There is of course technology involved, but it is “plain vanilla”: internet to upload the photos, digital cameras, most of them in smart phones, and one of the many stitching programs that are available to create a movie out of a sequence of photos.
It is about crowdsourcing. Involving thousands of people, leveraging on their individual skill to create something that is greater, that would not have been possible without that multitude. If yesterday I posted a news indicating that AI can make do without humans, today it is about leveraging humans as a whole to achieve what was impossible in the past.
It is amazing to see what people, each of us, actually, are willing to do, on a purely voluntary bases. And it is good to see that technology makes this possible.
Here it is about creating a captivating movie showing how the “corona” flashes, but the same willingness can be leveraged to make our cities smarter to help scientists unraveling the brain, map meteoroids, inventory wildlife.
