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Citizen Sky at a Glance - Part the Deuce: Collaboration
Science isn't done in a vacuum. In addition to the famous "standing on the shoulder of giants" analogy, science is also collaborative. This is becoming even more so as scientists specialize in narrower fields and the Internet makes communication much more efficient. My latest paper in the Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific had 22 coauthors! There are many different phases of this project and each takes a different skill set. Some people can do it all alone, but most people will want to share the load with others.
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Citizen Sky at a Glance - Part the One: Training Day
Citizen Sky is a big project with big ambitions and asking big questions. I'd like to take a few posts and outline what Citizen Sky is and is not. In this first post I'll describe the plans for training.
Citizen Sky is a three-year project with two goals. The science goal is to gather data and ideas from citizen scientists to help unravel the mystery of epsilon Aurigae. The education goal is to involve citizen scientists in authentic scientific research and make them real scientists. Participants are not helping scientists, they are scientists.
So we want participants to experience all phases of the scientific process. This begins with training ...Read more
Transcript of Chat with Dr. Bob
On Thursday, July 2 our own Dr. Bob was a featured guest in an online 1-hour online chat beginning at 1pm EDT (-4 UT). The discussion focused on scientific theories behind epsilon Aurigae and infrared photometric observing techniques. A transcript has been attached to this blog post. Stay tuned for future chats on topics such as visual observing, data analysis, EPO and more.Read more
Forums are Online!
I am happy to report that the Citizen Sky Forums are now online. Feel free to stop by and post your hearts out! Have a great weekend everyone.
Artists Needed for... art!
We are looking for a few good artists... or one would do, actually. We have a press release prepared and ready to be published as soon as the powers-that-be finish filling out some paperwork. However, we don't have an illustration or a logo to describe epsilon Aurigae or our project. Read this post in our forums for how to help!Read more
Chat Transcript w/Dr. Arne Henden
Dr. Arne Henden, PI of this project and director of the AAVSO, was in the chat room on Friday, July 10 at 1pm EST (-4UT). A transcript is attached to this blog post. He took questions on CCD and DSLR photometry of bright stars. We will host future chats for beginning visual observers and spectroscopy in the coming weeks. Stay tuned!
Project Update
It has been a while, so I thought I’d update everyone on a few components of the Citizen Sky Project.
The website continues to grow with more and more content and features being added. Very shortly you will be able to submit and view your own data via the Citizen Sky website (under the “Data” menu.) After that our wonderful web developer, Kate, will start to work on activating the team section of the site. Go read the overview if you haven’t heard about the Citizen Sky Team concept!Read more
Amateur Spectroscopy Chat Transcript
A transcript of the spectroscopy chat with Jeff Hopkins is now online. The chat was on Thursday at 3pm EDT (-4UT). The featured topic was amateur spectroscopy, primarily of epsilon Aurigae.
You can now subscribe to Citizen Sky posts!
Citizen Sky participants can now subscibe to email notifications of forum and blog posts.
You can add subscriptions by clicking on "My profile" in your personal Menu (on the right side of the page) and then clicking on the "Notifications" tab within your profile. You can create subscriptions based on a particular thread, content type, or author. In addition you can specify how frequently you would like to receive email notifications. You can also add subscriptions by following the links at the bottom of any blog or forum post.Read more
Submit Your Non-Visual Data to Citizen Sky!
You can now submit your PEP, CCD, and DLSR observations via the Citizen Sky website. Simply click on "Submit" and "Non-Visual" under the Data tab to access the non-visual submission form.
Submitting data via the Citizen Sky website instantly and permanently archives your data in the AAVSO International Database (AID.) Data from the AID are available to anyone at anytime and are frequently used in major research projects. So in effect if you submit your data to Citizen Sky they become available to any researcher out there who would like to use them!Read more
