NASA’s Swift and Fermi high-energy astrophysics research missions continue to help us discover the most energetic happenings in our Universe.

On Friday May 5th, 2025, Prof. Cominsky spoke about her career at Sonoma State University as the final presenter of the What Physicists Do lecture series. 

The Department of Physics & Astronomy and EdEon STEM Learning at Sonoma State University are proud to unveil the latest edition of The Physics Major newsletter — a celebration of student achievement, groundbreaking research, and the enduring spirit of scientific curiosity. GROWTH-Fueled Success This issue begins with a spotlight on the Department of Energy–funded GROWTH […]

The volunteer meeting will take place on Monday, December 18th at 5pm. We are also launching our office hours beginning that day, so we will be available 30 minutes before the start of the meeting to answer questions and chat about the project. This meeting in particular will feature a presentation given by EM2024 Science […]

Written by Hannah Hellman When Laura Peticolas submitted the Eclipse Megamovie 2024 (EM2024) grant for funding in 2022, we proposed to give away 100 3-D printed equatorial mounts to ensure that we would receive high quality photographs of the Sun’s corona. For our project’s purposes, “high quality” means that we would be able to reliably […]

In this article, Dr. James Riordan discusses several different citizen science projects in which citizen scientists can participate during the April 8, 2024 total solar eclipse. Megamovie is featured there, as well as Soundscapes and SunSketcher.

Written by Hannah Hellman Photo credit: David Rogers / Solar Eclipse, Richmond / CC BY-SA 2.0 On June 19th, 1927, Virginia Woolf traveled more than 219 miles, from London to North Yorkshire, to see a total solar eclipse. In her essay, “The Sun and the Fish,” written in 1928 (one year after her experience), she refers […]

NASA’s Eclipse Megamovie project is back for the 2024 total solar eclipse—and is seeking volunteers! During the four minutes of this solar experience, the sun’s atmosphere, or corona, will become visible. It’s a rare time when we are able to take photographs of the corona from Earth on a large scale.

Five years after partnering with Google and inspiring citizen scientists to journey out to view the Great American total solar eclipse, the Eclipse Megamovie 2024 (EM2024) team has been funded by NASA to bring high-quality DSLR imagery to the forefront of solar coronal studies.

Sonoma State graduate Alex Vasquez, an autistic STEM student who was also a key inspiration for the N3 program, won a National Science Foundation graduate research fellowship – becoming only the second SSU physics graduate in the Department’s history to receive that prestigious award.