You can contribute to the understanding of the universe that we all share.

Help us solve the mystery of epsilon Aurigae, a star that has baffled scientists since 1821. You don’t need any prior scientific training— we will give you all of the tools you need to become a citizen scientist*.

Everyone, regardless of science background, can play a role in the Citizen Sky Project… discover yours!  Get involved and you can do things like:

Learn about Astronomy Observe Stars Collaborate
Create Theories Study Data Publish Papers
*Citizen scientists are volunteers, many of whom have no prior scientific training, who work with trained scientific researchers to answer real-world questions. This means YOU!

Recent News

Submitted by bkloppenborg on March 15, 2010 - 2:17pm

How the data is reduced.
In short, we use a program developed specifically for reducing spectra from SPEX called SPEXTOOL.  It is written in a commonly used programming language for Astronomers called IDL.  I'm going to skip over a lot of the details, but in SPEXTOOL there are basically...

Submitted by Dr.Bob on March 11, 2010 - 3:12pm

Bounce during totality: have you noticed that epsilon is a bit brighter this month compared to last?  Totality is with us, but the Out of Eclipse variations continue.  We anticipate a significant brightening starting next month as the central opening in the disk begins crossing in front of the F star...

It's been a pleasure to...

Submitted by Aaron Price on March 10, 2010 - 10:50pm

(Update: The updated CDROM is now ready.) Donna Young, the Science Olympiad astronomy event coordinator, has completed a Teacher's Guide for the Citizen Sky project which will be on the next version of the Science Olympiad coach's CDROM. Next year's CD will be available in late summer or fall, but we have place...

Submitted by bkloppenborg on March 4, 2010 - 10:57pm

As I have mentioned before, the instrument we used at IRTF is called SPEX.  It is a medium resolution spectrograph.  Specifically, it's a cross-dispersing spectrograph.  What does this mean?  Well, instead of dispersing light like a prism where the colors are all in one line, SPEX breaks the spectrally dispersed light into...

Submitted by bkloppenborg on February 28, 2010 - 10:31pm

Picking up where I left off, in this blog post I will cover two topics: how we prepare for an observing session and how we conduct the observations.

How we prepare for an observing session.
The answer is short: meetings.  Lots and lots of meetings.  As part of our proposal we...

Submitted by Aaron Price on February 28, 2010 - 1:24pm

We have a guest blog article from a coauthor of a recent paper published about epsilon Aurigae. The author describes the system overall for new participants, then describes what they discovered with their radial velocity data.

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