workshop

Hello All,

Well, we've had some time to settle back into life after the 2nd Citizen Sky Workshop in San Francisco.  I still have some left over "warm fuzzies" from our time there.  Our venue, the California Academy of Sciences, was gorgeous and the staff there were very helpful and friendly.  We had a wonderful group of attendees and speakers.   I am very excited that everything was caught on video and look forward to posting those on the website soon.  I have already started to post the speakers' presentation files (ppt/pdf) so that you can follow along with the slides as you watch the videos once they are posted.  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

The 2nd Citizen Sky Workshop is fast approaching! A (hopefully) final schedule has been posted here. This workshop has an opportunity to be one of those once-in-a-lifetime opportunities. I haven't been able to find a record of a workshop with a similar theme: training citizen scientists to perform their own data analysis and write research papers for peer-reviewed journals. Of course, not all of that can be covered in just 3 days (it usually takes astronomers 6 years of grad school to figure it out!). But this is hopefully the starting point in the journey. In the next year we plan to focus more on the teams and will be assigning professional liasons and putting more training materials online. Remember, all video from this workshop will be posted online.Read more

The deadline to apply for the 1st round of selection is midnight (Eastern) tonight Monday, June 14th!

The second Citizen Sky Workshop will be held Friday-Sunday, September 3-5, 2010 at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.  We will kick-off the 3-day workshop with an opening reception and tour on the evening of September 2.  The focus of this workshop will be data analysis and scientific paper writing. We will have sessions updating us on the science of epsilon Aurigae, how to use VStar for basic data analysis, how to write papers for peer review, how to choose good research questions, doing literature reviews and much more. We also will have a free showing of the new Citizen Sky planetarium trailer on the California Academy of Science's brand-new planetarium dome.

Visit the wokshop page for a preliminary schedule and application.Read more

In August 2009 Citizen Sky held a workshop in Chicago on epsilon Aurigae and observing.  Most of the talks during this workshop were videotaped.  The first set of videos are now online along with their corresponding presentation files.  If you missed the workshop or if you would like to revisit your favorite talk, check it out.  More videos are on the way, so stay tuned!

The first video from the Chicago Workshop has been posted to the forums. It's a talk about supergiant stars by Dr. Doug Welch. Consider this a sample of much more video coming soon.

The Citizen Sky Workshop I in Chicago last week went well. A special thanks to Rebecca Turner for doing an outstanding job on coordinating Workshop I. She is a real pro at this.
 

Also a big thank you to the Adler staff for helping make everything go smoothly.

Bob Stencel provided us with an excellent overview of epsilon Aurigae and even I learned a few new things. Great job Dr. Bob!
 

In addition to any posting on the AAVSO web site of the two Workshops I held, I will be posting the two PowerPoint Presentations on the Epsilon Aurigae Campaign web site.Read more

Adler Planetarium - what a splendid astronomical facility - our compliments to Lucy, Larry, Rebecca, Aaron and the CS/Adler gang for hosting a marvelous first Citizen Sky workshop, Aug. 4-7, 2009.  Among the many meeting highlights was a report that appears to clinch the evidence for the existence of a cold disk in the system, a chance to meet with many key participants like Arne Henden, the Citizen Sky senior staff and Jeff Hopkins, Gerry Samolyk, Mike Simonsen - veteran observers, as well as meet the newer participants to the project (Hi PJ, Rhonda, Alice, Barry, Bill, Brian, Mark, Niko...).  Hopefully everyone who attended came away with new contacts and ideas that will carry us far.Read more

The Simostronomy Blog reported live from the first day of the first Citizen Sky Workshop this week at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. Also, Robin Leadbeater has reported some new interesting spectroscopic results from Aug. 6!

Read more