.Astronomy Day 1: Citizen Science November 30, 2009
Posted by sarah in: astro 2.0, dotastronomy , trackback
Merge galaxies with the new Galaxy Zoo merger project
Day 1 of .Astronomy is behind us and I think everyone is pleased with how it went. As organiser I was particularly happy that there weren’t any technical glitches, and the Unconference sessions sorted themselves out very nicely. The theme of the day was Citizen Science. Several projects have shown how keen non-professionals are to be involved in science, and how scientists themselves can benefit from the citizens’ active participation.
We heard from Gijs Verdoes-Kleijn of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands how European astronomers there want to bring the next generation of wide-field imaging surveys to the masses with the AstroWISE project. This is a citizen science project in quite a classical context, where the eyes of many are used to inspect vast quantities of data. What exactly the science goal would be is not entirely clear but their organised and structured approach to data distribution is impressive.
Next up was Robert Hollow of the Australian Telescope National Facility, who told us about the very cool Pulse@Parkes educational project. In this scheme, high school students can use the iconic Parkes radio telescope remotely to carry out observations of pulsars and learn how to carry out data analysis. Twenty eight schools have taken advantage of the programme, and some students have actually got a science paper out of their observations, which is a great result. Next week the first international Pulse@Parkes sessions will take place from Cardiff. Rob’s enthusiasm sparked an early idea for the afternoon’s Unconference: how could we set up a citizen science project for radio data?
The hour-long keynote talk of the day was shared by Chris Lintott and Arfon Smith from Oxford, who are two of the masterminds behind the highly successful Galaxy Zoo project. They showcased some of the Zoo’s success and explained the whole infrastructure behind the project. Supported by an API and hosted on Amazon’s S3 cloud computing platform, the project is now set up such that the development overheads are minimal and the site is robust against heavy traffic. A new Zoo project for galaxy mergers was launched just this week, where the user can a simple flash-based simulation to try and reproduce observed merger scenarios from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
One of the strongest justifications for engaging in citizen science projects came out of Raddick’s research into the motivations of Galaxy Zoo volunteers. They found that the biggest motivator for citizen scientists was simply to contribute to scientific research.
In the afternoon I attended the Unconference session led by Rob Hollow and Chris Lintott. The goal was to brainstorm about potential citizen science projects, particularly for radio data. What became clear from the discussion is that not all datasets are suitbale for these kinds of projects: the data presented to volunteers must require an answer to a very specific question, yet the question must be challenging enough to engage people’s minds. In simulation-type projects like the Galaxy Merger Zoo, the challenge is to find a process that is sufficiently well unerstood to be reproducible by a simple model, which can be tweaked by the user to reproduce an observed object. Supernova explosions? Planetary nebulae?
Some excellent ideas came up, and I ended up having quite surreal discussion with Rob Simpson about novel ways of representing spectroscopic data in a visually simplified way that doesn’t require an understanding of atomic or molecular physics or hours of staring at squiggly lines. It involved cows and clouds and is either a stroke of genius or a sign of impending brain rot. We’ll keep you posted.
Tomorrow I’ll be chairing a day that is all about using the web for research and we’ve got some great speakers lined up. Check out the programme and come join us on Ustream. Remember to tag your tweets with #dotastro, it was really great today to get feedback from all the online followers.
More blog posts on Rob‘s blog, Astroviz and astropixie.
Image: ESO
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The cow is clearly innovative.
Sounds like such a fabulous conference. I wish I had had the funding to go, but I’ll be looking forward to these updates!