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I am happy to announce a new feature on the Citizen Sky website! 

Participants can now create and search event listings.  This feature can be found under the "Communicate" tab on the homepage.  Events can be searched for by date, country, state, or event title.  Feel free to use this feature to post any Citizen Sky or Astronomy related public events!Read more

Last week our 1,000th user registered for the site! Congrats to rikibaba from Buffalo, NY, USA. Our goal was 1,000 users by the end of the year, so you all have far exceeded our expectations. Please keep getting the word out by posting to your favorite mailing lists, blogs, Facebook, etc. Read more

I am happy to announce that the first phase of the Team section of the Citizen Sky website is now up and running!

You can start your own team or join an existing team.  (You can search existing teams by keyword or see a list of all teams.)   Team leaders have the ability to make team membership open to anyone, or if they are looking for something very specific, team leaders can moderate the joining process.  Once the team has all of the necessary skills represented in its membership teams can even be closed.

Members of each team have the ability to create team posts.  These posts can be public (anyone can read them) or private (only other members of your team can read them.) Read more

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

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

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.

 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!

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

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.

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