Fun

Another visual, night sky citizen science project needs your help...

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It is very rare that I do a repost of a blog, but this time I had to make an exception.  Each day our friends over at Astrobites summarize a paper on ArXiv (or produce some other, similarly interesting blog post) written at an undergraduate readership level.  Yesterday's post discussed how brightness from stars (i.e. photometry) is actually measured:

http://astrobites.com/2011/12/15/how-do-astronomers-measure-the-brightness-of-something/

It goes into some discussion of spectral types and filters so it's well worth a read if you have some time to spare.

Now that the epsilon Auriage eclipse has passed, several people have been asking me and Dr. Bob "what's next?"  For me I'll spend this academic year finishing up my dissertation, helping finish team publications, and looking for my first postdoc.  Dr. Stencel, on the other hand, has an intrest in several other systems one of which is Zeta Auriage.

Back in 2009 Jeffrey Hopkins and CSky teamed up for a mini observing campaign of the secondary eclipse of Zeta Auriage, one of the other stars in the asterisim known as "the kids" in Auriage.  Now three years later the primary eclipse of this star system has arrived and we are yet again in need of your assistance to catch the eclipse.Read more

We are ready to distribute the Timothy Ferris Citizen Sky 6-minute planetarium trailer to theaters interested in showing it. Click for more information.

Click here for background information on the show and to view it via YouTube. But remember that YouTube's small screen doesn't do it justice. The Cal Academies rendered a beautiful show that excels on the big screen.

Versions of the planetarium show have been sent to all of the major planetarium manufacturers and content distributors. You should be able to contact your vendor of choice for a copy. They should be free to use.

Please contact us if you plan to show the video!! It will help us greatly if we can give the National Science Foundation a  report of how many theaters are showing the video! Just e-mail info@citizensky.org or use this feedback form.Read more

Aaron's dissertation is about change in scientific literacy of Citizen Sky participants. His defense is November 1 and will be broadcast online via U-Stream. Click for more information.Read more

Click here for an important Sept. 24 update! An attendee of the first Citizen Sky workshop in 2009 produced a documentary of the project called Mystery of the Sky. I have seen it and consider it very professionally produced and impressive. The director/produder, Guustaaf Damave, is looking for backers to help fund the creation of the first run of DVDs. Click here for more information. The DVD includes interviews with participants at the workshop, both amateur and professional, and background material on epsilon Aurigae itself. As of this posting, the project has raised about 1/3 of what is needed to produce the DVD.Read more

We are excited to announce the debut of a 7-minute Citizen Sky planetarium show narrated by Timothy Ferris. Please help us share the word and distribute this video far and wide!

It's a 3-day weekend for those in the USA. So here is a list of some eclipsing binary stars with expected eclipses this weekend. They are mostly bright so can be seen with the naked eye or binoculars. If you are out this weekend, look up, make a few obs and report them!

For you morning folk, our friend Algol (Beta Per - the Demon Star) will be in eclipse the evening of July 3-4. Mid eclipse is around 4:30am eastern, but it should start dimming around 12:30am or so. You don't have to stay up all night to get the whole eclipse. Just getting the start or end would be fun enough. Algol's chart is in our 10-Star Tutorial. It's brighter then epsilon Aurigae so can easily be seen from the city. Read more

The last few weeks I've heard from several observers that they haven't been able to do any observing due to poor weather and I got to thinking: if we can't talk about our observations, why not talk about our observatories? So I've created a thread in the forums so that you can tell us about your local observatory and discussed the Sachtleben Observatory of Hastings College, my home-town observatory.Read more

A lot of activity has been happening behind the scenes lately with the CS staff so we have, for the most part, been hiding in the shadows.  While I'm waiting for my collaborator on a separate project to call me, I thought I would take a few moments (which, in retrospect, turned out to be several few moments as you can see by the length of this post) to tell you about what is going on.

BrianRead more