Armchair Astronomy

[Nirmal]

The zooniverse project started by Hubble Space Telescope team in Aug
2009 is a very useful initiative for all amateur astronomers like us
to do some "volunteer computing" as they put it. They have about 11
projects on their site, including 3 non-astronomy based projects which
require the logged in users to sift through their data and help
identify interesting features.
The projects range from hunting for new planets, galaxies, supernovae
to studying interesting features on the sun and moon.
Also started in association with the zooniverse project is setilive
which involves searching for aliens!! in exoplanetary data available
from the Kepler satellite. Log in and enjoy.
They also have a very active amateur forums for answering basic and
not so basic questions on astronomy.

Note that these project are not passive computing projects where you
share your machine computation time with their servers. The projects
require you to share your time and energy in looking through NASA
satellite and telescope data to identify interesting objects.

https://www.zooniverse.org
http://www.planethunters.org/
http://www.setilive.org/

Regards,
Nirmal

[Nirmal]

And well arm-chair astronomers now have their first joural paper in an Astronomy journal. Kepler's (the satellite) data is a big hunting ground for ET.

nirmal

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Planet Hunters <te...@planethunters.org>
Date: Wed, Apr 17, 2013 at 1:26 AM
Subject: Planet Hunters Update
To: PLANET...@jiscmail.ac.uk

Dear Planet Hunters,

There's been plenty going on at planethunters.org!

The discovery paper for PH1b, a circumbinary planet in a four-star system and the project's first confirmed planet, has been officially accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. PH1b has been given an official Kepler designation of Kepler-64b and added to the list of planets in the Kepler field. You can read more about the paper and PH1b on our blog.   

In other news: the site has been updated with fresh data which has never been seen before. These light curves have yet to be fully analysed by the NASA Kepler team, so there are likely to be unknown planets hiding in the data waiting to be discovered. Maybe you'll be the first to spot one!

Happy Hunting, 

 

Meg and the Planet Hunters Team

PS. Don't forget you can also keep track of the latest Planet Hunters news on Twitter and Facebook.

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