Blogs / Rebecca's blog / Beginners' Online Chat Transcript Posted
Beginners' Online Chat Transcript Posted
The chat transcript to our Nov. 18 online Beginner's Chat has been posted. The chat was for those Citizen Sky participants who are relatively new to astronomy and/or the Citizen Sky project. Below is the original announcement:
Everyone is invited to an online "Beginners' Chat" to be held this Wednesday, November 18 at 8 pm Eastern (7 pm Central, 6 pm Mountain, 5 pm Pacific). The goal of the chat is to answer questions about Citizen Sky, epsilon Aurigae, and/or astronomy in general. The tone will be tailored to new participants in the project so this is a great chance to find out more about the project without feeling overwhelmed by the scale of the project.
Dr. Bob and his grad student Brian K. will be on hand to answer questions about science. Chris Stephan, a science teacher from Florida, will be on hand to answer questions about making visual observations of stars. Rebecca Turner, the project manager, will be on hand to answer general questions about Citizen Sky.
To join the chat, simply point your web browser to the URL below:
http://www.aavso.org/cgi-bin/irc.cgi
At that page, type in your name and press "Login". You'll be taken to the chat room where you can type in a message for others to read or you can just watch the discussion silently.
We hope to see you there!
Among many things … I’m a teacher at Oil City High School here in NW Pennsylvania. I have a team of 10 students that are working on the project making visual observations and reporting their results. We are doing the visual observations a little differently so that more people can participate. I’m not sure if others out there are using this same method, but it has opened up the project to a significant number of students that otherwise would probably not have participated.Instead of getting everyone in a single location on a regular basis (which is impossible for 10 kids), we are using digital cameras to take pictures of Aurigae and then posting the digital pictures where we can all get to them. Each individual student then makes a visual estimate of the brightness of epsilon Aurigae using the AAVSO finder charts and the digital pics, and we are reporting it that way at citizensky.org. I checked with the folks at the AAVSO and they didn't see why this method would not be just as accurate as live brightness estimates with the naked eye. We have better quality control for submitted data this way as well.I could send examples of some of the pics to anyone that wants them. Just email me at tspuck@hotmail.com.