Chandra Clarke

Award-winning entrepreneur. Author. Professional Optimist.

  • Home
  • About
  • Books & Shorts
  • Press & Awards
  • Citizen Science
  • Contact Me

Be a Link in the Chain with the Citizen Cate Experiment

September 20, 2016 By Chandra Clarke Leave a Comment

Nasaeclipse13nov2012

Project: Citizen CATE Experiment

On August 21st, 2017, the United States will be in the path of totality for a total solar eclipse–an event that hasn’t happened since 1979! The Citizen CATE (Continental America Telescopic Eclipse) Experiment is offering a team of volunteers across the U.S. a unique opportunity to get involved in research surrounding this rare event. The goal of the project is to make a continuous, 90-minute movie of the solar corona–the “crown” surrounding the sun–during the eclipse. It’s quite an undertaking, considering the path of the eclipse will span from Oregon to South Carolina!

The plan for accomplishing this will involve a network of volunteers at 61 stations across the nation taking pictures of the totality phase of the eclipse at their location. Then, the photos will be aligned, the locations and times calibrated, and a single time series will be constructed. This experiment will provide context for other eclipse experiments, as the time evolution of the inner corona is still not well understood,  and features such as newly discovered “magnetic bubbles” have not yet had a chance to be studied in the context of a live solar eclipse. In addition, as the project site says, “…the image sequence will provide a beautiful perspective of the solar eclipse as never seen before.”

There are plenty of ways for eclipse enthusiasts across the nation to get involved in Project CATE. The team needs volunteers for the following positions:

  • Site organizers and on-the-ground checking: The viewing sites must be checked on the ground, and weather forecasts used to identify sites where cloudy conditions may preclude visibility.
  • Equipment definition: Since the specifications for the images needed are rather specific, volunteers are needed to assist in finding available equipment that will accomplish these goals at each site. Equipment coordinators will also need to take into account the utilities available at each location.
  • Social media and website development: Since the project will rely heavily on internet communication through all phases of the project, web development and social networking expertise is highly sought after.
  • Astronomer selection and training: Since over 60 amatuer volunteers will be needed to carry out the photography for this experiment, trainers will be needed at each site to make sure everyone involved is familiar with the equipment and location.
  • Corporate sponsors: Funding for the equipment used by each volunteer observer, and for data collection, is being sought.
  • Observers: Finally, the project organizers need people on the ground at each site during the eclipse, gathering images and data! Here is a spreadsheet of the specific viewing locations.

Sounds like an exciting opportunity to get outside and check out a one-in-a-generation event, right? The images and data will be made publically available after the project’s completion, and all project contributors will be acknowledged in research papers citing this experiment. Though volunteers are asked to pay for their own travel expenses during the experiment, organizers hope that they can donate each site telescope to the on-the-ground observers! If you’d like to get involved, please email the project chair Matt Penn at mpenn@nso.edu.

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit
  • More
  • Pinterest
  • Pocket

Debris disks – needles in the haystack?

February 11, 2014 By Chandra Clarke Leave a Comment

Finding extrasolar planets (planets not in our solar system) is hard — it’s a big universe, after all. However, if you concentrate your efforts on finding “debris disks” (clouds of dust, gas, and rocks) around stars, you might have better luck finding planets. This is because planets form from these disks (also called “YSO disks”).

The NASA WISE (wide-field infrared survey explorer) mission almost certainly has images of debris and YSO disks in its image set, but until now, we haven’t had the resources to start looking through them all. Disk Detective, the latest project out of the Zooniverse group, wants you to start sifting and classifying the WISE images.

Using the Disk Detective interface, you will find new debris disk stars by looking at flipbooks of images of the star. You’ll be looking for objects that don’t move around or break apart from one image to the next, and that are round and clearly defined. You’ll place a circle marker around the things you think are disks.

Why not just have a computer analyze all of this material? Computers still aren’t good at image recognition and usually confuse debris disks around stars with other astronomical objects like galaxies and nebulae.

Disk Detective represents NASA’s first foray into citizen science (in terms of crowdsourcing help; of course, it’s always done public outreach and encouraged public participation) and this is it’s first partnership with Zooniverse.

Image by MasterTux from Pixabay

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit
  • More
  • Pinterest
  • Pocket

Pluto, We Hardly Knew Ye

February 10, 2014 By Chandra Clarke Leave a Comment

As anyone who works in academia can tell you, researchers get into bitter fights over obscure things all the time. Archeologists clash over the dating of Mongolian pottery sherds. Entomologists can come to blows when discussing the mating rituals of a nursery spider. Network theorists, meanwhile, will have Hatfield vs. McCoy style fights over clustering coefficients and epidemic thresholds, and other random words strung together to create jargon.

Unless these debates have something to do with sex or health they generally don’t spill over into the mainstream media. Most of us never hear and certainly don’t care about these issues. Not when there are bills to be paid and kids to feed and more important questions to consider like: Should any actor who plays a noble and daring Star Trek captain *ever* be allowed to do commercials about bran cereal? (My answer: NO)

But then a curious thing happened. Some astronomers got together and decided to reclassify a smallish hunk of rock. And all heck broke loose.*

That rock is called Pluto and it was ‘demoted’ from a planet to a dwarf planet. Now you wouldn’t think that that the scientific classification of something some 5 billion kilometres away (in American units: a kajillion football fields) would fire up the general public that much.

But consider: The California Assembly, in a fit of public policy humour (?!), decided to jokingly ‘denounce’ the International Astronomical Union for ‘scientific heresy.’ The New Mexico House of Representatives, having solved all of its water supply and infrastructure problems, refused to acknowledge the new classification and declared March 13 “Pluto Planet Day.” The controversy filtered all the way down to a small village in the heart of Ontario, where a shopkeeper posted a sign saying “Pluto, we’ll miss you.”

Years later and the issue just isn’t going away. Indeed, there are several Facebook pages called “When I was your age, Pluto was a planet” which have 1000s of  members.

So what gives? Why are people still so disturbed by this? Even Venetia Phair (who as an 11-year-old girl with an interest in mythology, suggested the name) said she was “largely indifferent” to the hullabaloo.

Is it because Pluto is also the name of the goofy Disney dog, and thus it has iconic appeal? Are people annoyed that the IAU was mucking about with classifications when it should have been doing something sensible, like changing the name of Uranus?

Is it possible people feel a deeper connection to space-related issues than we realized? Perhaps. We may not always be willing to open our wallets to fund it, but space exploration remains a fundamental part of our culture. The day a human steps out onto the surface of Mars, I can guarantee that at least six billion of us will be glued to to our TVs and computer screens. (And if a Martian jumped out and said boo! while we watched, there’d be six billion people lying around in a dead faint.)

More than anything else though, I think that for Westerners, Pluto represents our increasing frustration with uncertainty. For most people, the church is no longer the forbidding, last-word-on-everything institution it once was. In fact there’s no single “church” any more — there are more denominations now than you can wave a censer at.We’re no longer ruled by kings with divine rights either — governments are more often the subject of jokes than fear.

Education is no longer an exclusive institution  — it’s become commoditized (this is good), had its certifications diluted with rampant cheating and the spread of diploma mills (this is bad), and a standard public school education hasn’t really prepared us for living in the 20th century, much less the 21st (really bad — fail!).

War is hazy and unclear (it’s no longer army versus army), and even our sports teams are uncertain, what with players traded on a weekly basis. Indeed, one of the only certainties remaining in life is that the Toronto Maple Leafs will play just well enough to get to the Stanley Cup finals… and drop out in the second round.

Pluto seems to have become a popular line in the sand, er, sky. This far and no farther, we seem to be saying, because “the solar system has nine planets…” is one of the fundamental things we learned as kids.

But if Pluto’s reclassification bugs you, be warned: that tree of life diagram you memorized as a kid?

You don’t even want to know how *that’s* been changed around since you last looked.

(* Didja notice how I avoided using ‘uproar of astronomical proportions’ there? Didja?)

Image by skeeze from Pixabay

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit
  • More
  • Pinterest
  • Pocket

A star is born: help research star formation

January 2, 2014 By Chandra Clarke 3 Comments

The Spitzer Space Telescope’s broad infrared view of our Milky Way Galaxy. The image was created from more than 800,000 frames, so it is the most detailed infrared picture of our galaxy to date. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The people behind the Zooniverse series of citizen science programs have another great offering: The Milky Way Project.

In this project, organizers want you to review infrared images taken by a camera on board the Spitzer Space Telescope.  The photos were part of a survey called GLIMPSE, which is designed to map the plane of the Milky Way galaxy. More than 440,000 images need to be reviewed.

You’ll be looking for and marking patterns in the interstellar dust: bubbles, star clusters, EGOs (strange green smudges), galaxies, and other objects, in a bid to help researchers learn more about how stars form, and how their formation affects space around them.

We already know that interstellar dust, which is roughly one-tenth the size of a grain of sand, is a critical part of star formation;  clouds of dust and gas collapse to form stars. But exactly how the teeny silicon particles behave is still poorly understood. Classifying and sorting the images, you will be giving researchers a way to piece together the story of how stars and galaxies are born and evolve.

As usual, the imagery is gorgeous, and the interface is simple to use. You can check out the guide on this page.

Share this:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit
  • More
  • Pinterest
  • Pocket
Next Page »

Your Host:

On Sale Now:

Search

Recent Posts

  • Beware the Unusual Home . . .
  • Mirror, Mirror… er… in the Sky?
  • 2020 Awards Eligibility Post
  • Dinosaurs: Birds of a Feather?
  • Wool Gathering in the Modern Era

Like My Work?

Want to put something in the tip jar?

Buy me a book! Bonus: You’ll be supporting another author when you do! Just click on the graphic below and make the purchase – it will send it to my (hidden) address or Kindle as a gift.

My Wish List: https://www.amazon.com/hz/wishlist/ls/1WL17UVY8T3OQ?&sort=default

Tags

advertising Android Astronomy Australia babies Bee biology books California canada children Christmas Citizen Science citizen science games climate change computer-based crowdfunding distributed computing dogs do it anywhere England environment funding game Garden gardening History insects iPhone NASA Parenting Pets pollution science science communication space spring technology ted Television trees USA weather Wildlife Zooniverse

Follow me on Twitter

My Tweets

You might also like...

  • A Proofreading Course
  • An Editing Course
  • Citizen Science
  • Learn English Grammar
  • Online Writing Courses
  • Proofreading Service
  • Writing Advice

Site Sponsor

  • Privacy
  • Terms

Copyright © 2021 Chandra Clarke. All Rights Reserved.