Science Cheerleader

In Chicago August 4-7th? Check out Georgette’s report on a citizen science workshop at the Adler Planetarium.

For 175 years scientists have been baffled by a star in the constellation of Aurigae, the charioteer.  The star is an eclipsing binary variable star, which means it circles another star around their joint center of mass.  From our perspective on Earth, there are long periods of time about every 27 years when the secondary star eclipses the other much brighter star.  Instead of appearing generally brighter from Earth, epsilon Aurigae appears dimmer.

What is this secondary star? Theories have ranged from black holes, to semitransparent stars to dark clouds of dust…

Take on the mystery of epsilon Aurigae with the American Association of Variable Star Observer’s Citizen Sky project. The project will use citizen observations to unravel the truth behind the seemingly invisible secondary star during its extremely long eclipse of epsilon Aurigae. The wealth of reading material on the Citizen Sky website is a good place to start if you’ve never done any observation before, I personally recommend walking through the 10 star training and then reading the section on “Visual Observing” to learn how to estimate the brightness of a star (its easy!). As the summer progresses, more information will be added about submitting your data and how to analyze your results in preparation for the Fall and Winter, when epsilon Aurigae will be visible to the naked eye in the Northern hemisphere. If you’re in the Chicago area, the first workshop will be taking place at the Adler Planetarium from August 4th-7th, 2009.  If not, follow along through the forums and blog, all located off of the main Citizen Sky website.

Project Snapshot:
Topics: astronomy, citizen science
Location: from anywhere
Duration: Fall-Winter, as long as you want
Cost: free
Gear: computer to submit results, telescope (not required)
Level of Difficulty: can be easy or difficult, depending on your level of involvement

…how about classifying a few while you’re gazing?  SCOPE, or Stellar Classification Online Public Exploration, needs the help of citizen scientists to observe stars and compare their features to the sun. The gases on the outer visible surface of the star absorb the light emitted from the inside of the star, and these absorption spectra are collected by a prism placed in front of a telescope lens.  These absorption spectra can vary with temperature and the composition of the gases on the star’s outer surface.

Spectra of stars that are currently not classified are made available online by PARI volunteers for comparison to stars that have already been classified.  Interested participants can read their science information section to learn more about stars and their spectra.  There is a also a special tutorial section where new users can learn what a typical star’s spectra looks like and how it can be classified.

Many thanks to Christi Whitworth for bringing such a neat project to our attention.  (Remember readers, if you have any projects to suggest, use this link!)

PROJECT SNAPSHOT:

• Topics: astronomy, star gazing
• Location: at home, close to home
• Duration: any
• Cost: free
• Gear: computer, internetr
• Level of Difficulty: easy

NASA has been in the news a lot lately – President Obama just named Charles Bolden as its new administrator a few days ago, the Hubble Telescope was repaired successfully, and soon NASA will prepare to launch the space shuttle Endeavour for a jouney to the International Space Station.  For those citizen scientists interested in learning more about astronomy and physics, NASA has an excellent citizen science website filled with many ways that you can both access and contribute to their ongoing collection of observations.  I am thrilled that NASA is beginning to make access to their research more public in the hopes that other governmental organizations will soon follow suit.  Listed below are ways that you can become more involved in the future of space travel.

• Night Sky Network: Are you a part of an astronomy club?  Like looking at photos from space?  Or maybe you are interested in spreading the word about NASA missions to your local community?  All of these resources and more are available in NASA’s Night Sky Network.  One particular note of interest are the funding resources on this site that are available for high school astronomy groups.
• MY NASA DATA:  My NASA Data, or Mentoring and inquirY using NASA Data for Atmospheric and earth science for Teachers and Amateurs (say that three times fast!) is an excellent resource for classroom teachers interested in new ideas to enrich next year’s astronomy curriculum.  Teachers can make custom data sets from published data sets collected by NASA that their students can learn how to analyze, or students can simulate what an actual satellite orbit patterns might look like.
• What’s Observable Tonight?: Visitors can search by an observation date, location and other constraints to find all asteroids and comets that are observable on that night.
• Space Calendar: The Space Calendar covers space-related activities and anniversaries for the coming year. Included are over 1,700 links to related home pages!

There are many more activities where this short list comes from, and I hope all of you will check out the vast amount of information on the NASA website.  Many thanks to Paul Shin, one of our Science Cheerleader subscribers, for suggesting this citizen science resource.  As always, should you have any citizen science information that you would like to share with our readers, feel free to contact us here.

The “distributed computing” project known as SETI@home just celebrated its 10th anniversary. For the past decade, thousands of volunteers have loaned the experiment a little bit of their personal computers’ idle capacity to help in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence in the universe. There’s no sign of ET yet, but the San Francisco Chronicle’s Science Editor David Perlman reports that the quest continues–and has a lot to be proud of.

The same technology that stitches together 235,000 PCs around the world to create a supercomputer for SETI@home now powers nearly a hundred other such research projects, according to Perlman. These range from Rosetta@home, which helps chart possible new designs for proteins, to Einstein@home, which sifts satellite data for evidence that may prove Einstein’s prediction of gravity waves.

Want to volunteer your computer to pitch in whenever it’s not fully occupied? (Many of these programs have cool dashboards that let you tune in to the analysis and learn a bit about the underlying science.) Visit the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing and check out the list of projects to choose from.

GLOBE at Night wants you to  participate in a global campaign to observe and record visible stars to help researchers measure light pollution.  ”2008 marked a monumental shift in human history when the number of people living in cities exceeded half the people on Earth. Because of the ambient light of urban landscapes, many city dwellers have never seen a sky full of stars.” (Including this urbanite!) 2008’s program inspired 6,838 measurements of night-sky brightness by citizen scientists around the world. 

“While we have just begun to analyze the data, we have strong anecdotal evidence from our citizen-scientist network in North America that they experienced abnormally cloudy skies this year,” says Connie Walker, GLOBE at Night project manager at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) in Tucson, AZ.

GLOBE at Night takes approximately 15-30 minutes. Do it as a family or get a bunch of friends together and do some real star-gazing! Start by finding Orion an hour after sunset between March 16-28th and follow the four, simple steps described on Globe’s site.

 Orion, the Great Hunter, looks like this (left).  ”Look for three bright stars close together in an almost-straight line. These three stars represent Orion’s belt. The two bright stars to the north are his shoulders and the two to the south are his feet.”

 No prior experience is necessary and all the information you need to participate is on the site including activity kits for families, teachers and students.  All observations will be available online via Google Earth.

On a related note, Science Cheerleader subscriber Phil Hoffman sent in this news tip: The Galileoscope is a high-quality, low-cost telescope kit developed for the International Year of Astronomy 2009 by a team of leading astronomers, optical engineers, and science educators. No matter where you live, with this easy-to-assemble refractor, citizen scientists can see the celestial wonders that Galileo first glimpsed 400 years ago and that still delight stargazers today, including lunar craters, the phases of Venus, the moons of Jupiter, and Saturn’s rings!

Globe at Night 

Project Snapshot

> Topics  Astronomy & Space, Climate & Weather, Ecology & Environment, Nature & Outdoor

> Location Close to home, Outdoors

> Duration  15-30 minutes

> Cost  Free

> Gear  Just a computer to log in your observations

> Level of Difficulty Easy

 NASA’s Radio Jove program “helps amateur scientists and students observe and analyze natural radio emissions of Jupiter, the Sun, and our galaxy.”

Build and use your own Decametric Radio Telescope.  Follow Live Observations Online. 

Why study radio waves from Pluto? “Radio waves are generated because the planet has a magnetic field. This magnetic field originates deep in the interior of the planet, and the overall strength of the magnetic field directly affects the type of radio emission emitted by the planet. This helps us with the theory of how the magnetic field is created in the interior, and in determining the composition of the various interior layers.”

Everything you’ll need to get started, make and record observations and draw upon your data can be found on the comprehensive NASA website. There’s even a  Jupiter Radio Emission Prediction Table to help you plan key days and times to capture radio signals. For example, folks like me who live on the East Coast, can use a radio telescope to detect signals from Pluto between February and September several times a month on specific dates, winnowed down to nearest minute. 

One way your data will be used is to see how well the predictions of radio storm probability match the actual occurrence of radio storms. The more observations recorded and shared, the better.

PROJECT SNAPSHOT

 Topics:Cosmology, Geology, Space Science,

 Location: At or close to home; indoors.

Level of Difficulty: Pretty technical

Fee: anywhere from $50 to $250 for Radio Telescope kits and parts

Gear: Needs a computer, software and Radio Telescope

Duration: a couple of  hours to assemble Radio Telescope; observations last 5-15 minutes a pop.

Suitable for students with adult supervision. Site includes an extensive lesson plan.

Want to gaze at stunning astronomical photographs and help astronomers do their research at the same time? Meet, GalaxyZoo.org, a Web site that enables amateur galaxy analyzers to work from the comfort of their computers.

You don’t need any specialized knowledge. After going through a brief tutorial and qualifying test, you can head to the Galaxy Analysis portion of the site and start reviewing images that need to be cataloged. Just look over each object’s shape and label it with the proper “profile”: spiral galaxy, elliptical galaxy, star, or don’t know.

Volunteers have turned out millions of galaxy classifications, which affiliated scientists will be including in upcoming journal articles. The site reports that last year, its “armchair astronomers” discovered more than “500 overlapping galaxies in the local universe when astronomers had previously only known of 20 such systems.”

PROJECT SNAPSHOT

> Topics: Astronomy, computers.
> Location: At home, office, or anywhere you can get to a computer.
> Duration: As short or as long as you like. It only takes a moment to classify each galaxy.
> Cost: Free.
> Gear: Computer with Internet access.
> Level of difficulty: Easy (after you do the tutorial).

Clear skies are beckoning you! Through Monday, November 3rd, the Great World Wide Star Count invites you to join in this international event that “encourages everyone to go outside, look skywards after dark, count the stars they see in certain constellations and report what they see online.”

These folks make is super easy to  determine which constellation you will observe, what to look for and how to record your observations.  Let me know if you decide to give it a shot!

PROJECT SNAPSHOT

> Topics: Space, Astronomy
> Location: Near home, outside.
> Duration: About 10 minutes to review website, determine constellations and download activity guide; another 10 minutes to gaze and 10 minutes to enter data.
> Cost: $0.
> Gear: Nothing but the naked eye!
> Level of difficulty: Pretty simple.