CATE 2024 will maintain an open data policy for its eclipse data; all data products generated at the 2023 and 2024 total solar eclipses will be made publicly available following calibration and integration.
We acknowledge the data sovereignty of the communities with which we will be working during this project. While not every community will be Indigenous, we will work with all communities to develop a plan for equitable data sharing according to the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance. All reprocessed CATE 2017 data will be released following the same protocols and procedures as described for CATE-2024.
The primary data to be produced by CATE 2024 are images of the 2023 Australian TSE from each of our training stations; images of the 2024 U.S. TSE from the official volunteer stations; and calibration measurements (e.g., darks and flats) required to produce calibrated observations from each of these events. Additional data resulting from performance and characterization of the observation system not required for analysis of the observational data will be made public via publications and reports, but are not considered data products.
The full CATE 2024 observing system will generate the following data products, in Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) files:
Level-0: raw uncalibrated camera frames and associated metadata required for calibration
Level-1: Linearized, background-subtracted polarized and unpolarized brightness images in calibrated brightness units, including full metadata
Quicklook products serve as a real-time data quality monitor at individual eclipse observing sites and can be used to generate high-dynamic-range images for rapid dissemination (see Penn et al. 2020). Scientific data products comply with FITS v4.0 and WCS standards for interoperability with a variety of existing software tools used in the solar physics community.
Products are hosted on servers at SwRI and will be archived for long-term accessibility in community repositories like the NASA Solar Data Analysis Center (SDAC).