The idea is to gather a rich data set around the first total solar eclipse to cross a large portion of the United States in almost 100 years. Technology has changed exponentially in the last century; this rare cosmic event is the first time many will experience a total eclipse, and it's also an opportunity to experience it with new technology. And in Google's case, that means using their machine learning to study this eclipse and develop new ways to study cosmic events in the future. The initiative is in collaboration with a group of scientists led by University of California, Berkeley's Space Sciences Laboratory, who came up with the idea of crowdsourcing an image archive of next week's total solar eclipse back in 2011.