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Milky Way Project: Data Release 1

February 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Spitzer's view of the central regions of our Galaxy (NASA/Milky Way Project)

ResearchBlogging.orgSince its launch little more than over a year ago, Milky Way Project, the citizen science initiative to identify bubbles in the interstellar medium of our Galaxy, has gathered an amazing amount of classifications: over half a million bubbles drawn by around 35,000 users. Before Christmas we reached a major milestone when we submitted our first scientific paper for the project to Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS).

Following some nice iterations (never said I didn’t like peer review….) with the referee for the paper, and coverage by the BBC at the AAS conference in Austin, TX, in January, we posted the paper to Arxiv a couple of weeks ago. From here it’s available to anyone to download and read. The paper was formally accepted today (yay!) but we haven’t uploaded the final revision to the Arxiv yet – keep an eye out for it in the replacements section if you’re interested, we did improve it significantly with the input of the referee.

As the project was only made possible by NASA publicly sharing the data from the Spitzer Space Telescope, we have of course made our first data catalogues publicly available as well on a dedicated site and on FigShare.

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Stargazing

January 20, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Now that I work in astronomy professionally, it’s all about telescopes, politics, publishing, proposals. I easily forget what got me into this game: looking up at the stars and wondering what the heck is out there, or reading about relativity and going: “huh?”.

This past week the UK collectively discovered its love for stargazing with the help of the BBC and a whole lot of keen astronomers. Professionals and amateurs took part in Stargazing events all over the country, and even more watched along on TV. 3.8 million of them, apparently, which is amazing.

Lots of my on- and offline friends and colleagues were on the air, and I was really disappointed I couldn’t watch, as I’m abroad and no TV. Some years ago I spent a summer at the BBC working on a similar programme (yes, I even met Brian Cox) and I have a lot of fun memories from that time. But anyway, I hope lots of you enjoyed watching or taking part, whether you’re an old hand in the business or an astro-newbie.

Planethunters, Milky Way Project‘s cousin in the Zooniverse family, got some special attention, as new volunteers signed up in droves to carry out almost 1.1 million new classifications in 48 hours. As a result, the Planethunters team were able to announce the discovery of a potential new exoplanet by a Stargazing viewer.

This great little video’s been doing the rounds on the interwebs, created on the back of BBC Stargazing, showing how and why we simulate galaxies. It was created by Oxford astronomer Andrew Pontzen, who featured on the programme.

 

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Whale.Fm

November 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment

A flurry of news coverage and social media attention for the latest of the Zooniverse projects today, Whale.fm. Together with SciAm, the Zooniverse are inviting you to listen to recordings of whale sounds to identify “dialects” in how different species of whales communicate.

I know, I know, it sounds bizarre, and I haven’t had the chance to try it out yet. But Rob gave me a sneak preview some time ago and it looks like great fun – if a little hypnotising. I probably won’t have the chance to make my contribution until the Christmas break. But if you’re less busy than I am, go take a peak!

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Zooniverse News

July 13, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Zooniverse, the umbrella organisation for several well-known citizen science projects, like Galaxy Zoo, Moon Zoo,  Old Weather and of course Milky Way Project, has made a couple of exciting announcements recently.

Last month, the Zooniverse folks launched their latest project, Icehunters. In Icehunters, you can help look for icy bodies in the outer Solar System in images from large ground-based telescopes Subaru, in Hawaii, and Magellan in Chile. I love the look of the site and the science is really cool – but wow, are those images ugly! In terms of aesthetics, this may well be the most realistic citizen science project to date :-)

Last week, Zooniverse issues its first ever open Call for Proposals. Thanks to funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, researchers can now apply to Zooniverse to set up citizen science projects in their area of science, as long as they can provide the expertise, science support and a dataset. Deadline for applications is 15 August and all details are here.

Congratulations to Arfon, Chris, Rob and the whole Zooniverse team on all the exciting developments.

In recent weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time talking about Milky Way Project science with colleagues who aren’t involved in the project. It’s been really great to see others appreciate the value of what we’ve done, which seems to show that “out of the box” research methods are becoming more established in the community. Our first paper is taking shape, and I hope it’s the first of many to use our dataset.

 

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Old Weather Voyages

February 16, 2011 By

Old Weather Voyage for the HMS Africa.

My favourite non-astronomy citizen science project is Old Weather – the Zooniverse project where users are asked to transcribe weather data from World War I ship’s logs. It’s climate science for the history buff. Archaeometeorology, or something. Old Weather has a neat new feature on its webpages: Old Weather Voyages. Using the data recorded by us volunteers, the Old Weather team have created animations of the ships’ voyages, displaying a ship’s position over time on the map with the relevant log page. The temperature is colour-coded.

Rob explains all on the blog. Very very neat.

Filed Under: Sci 2.0 Tagged With: , ,
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