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Join a Worldwide Planet Search
An anonymous reader writes "Astronomers have been looking for alien worlds for more than 15 years, and now you too can join the search. The Planet Hunters project is the latest citizen-science campaign organized by the crew at Zooniverse. Hundreds of thousands of computer users are already helping Zooniverse classify galaxies through Galaxy Zoo, and analyze lunar craters through Moon Zoo. This new project aims to recruit users to check data gathered by NASA's Kepler mission, which is expected to detect hundreds of Earthlike planets in a region of the constellation Cygnus. Kepler's science team detects planets by looking for the slight dimming in a star's light that's caused when a planetary disk passing over. By making precise measurements of that periodic dimming, astronomers can figure out how big the planet is, then follow up with other types of observations to confirm its existence and estimate its mass. More than 500 planets have been detected beyond our solar system, and Kepler is just getting started."
It's just under me here.
Have tried the first and second link (trying to get to planethunters.org), and the link in the msn.com article, but get an error message from Chrome about too many redirects (error 310, I would copy the message here but can't seem to paste into the slashdot text box).
Is anyone else getting this problem?
If they let the person whose computer found a planet name it, I'm sure they'd get lots of people.
Can I keep it?
I wonder if user participation would significantly increase if there was a Facebook app for sites similar to Planet Hunters and Galaxy Zoo. Most people probably aren't particularly interested in helping in the hunt for planets or classification of galaxies. Maybe if it got turned into a Facebook app with achievements and the likes, people would be more inclined to participate.
Could PH and GZ be a viable method of implementing a CAPTCHA? Help to classify galaxies or search for exoplanets in order to prove yourself human? The whole reason these sites exist is because its a difficult task for a computer to perform, correct?
Why do they want to use humans to look true all the data?
Why not just crunch the data with a program. and ask people to help run that. like seti@home and all the other project like that?
The basic idea of the project is to identify spikes in the dataset. To do that you, click on a plus sign to indicate you've found a spike, drag on a box that appears in mid screen to wherever your spike is and then try to position the box on the spike. I don't know why, but dragging was slightly laggy and so you feel somewhat like a drunk trying to place the box where you want it. Spent more time trying to position the boxes than it took to id spikes.
Once you've positioned the box, if you want to narrow or widen the box, you're stuck with a Macintosh window resize mechanism that only lets you adjust from the lower right. Resizing the window moves the dot you've just positioned which puts you back in drunken sailor drag mode.
A simpler interface would just track where you click and place the boxes accordingly along with a 'keep the center dot in place whilst adjusting the box boundaries from any edge" resize mechanism. Maybe that'l be in Planet Hunter V2.0 .
I managed to try it before it was slashdotted.
The interface is clumsy, it takes a lot of time to zoom in and zoom out, it's sluggish on Linux, I didn't manage to find the zoom out button (although the hints stated that there is one), there is no option to simply zoom in on a specific region and I have to drag the things at the bottom manually, which makes it quite uncomfortable and discourages me to look at more planets. The interface needs to be fast and convenient if they want me to look at more than one chart for possible transitions. I spend more 90% of the time working with the zoom in and out draggers.
Another thing, there is no clear explanation as to what am I looking for, and I don't understand why a human is more suitable than a computer. As far as I understand it, I need to look for places where the brightness decreased, which should be indicated both by low-brightness measurements and lack of high-brightness ones at the same spot. But there's no word on the site that I should look for that. And I don't understand why I'm better at finding this than a computer is. Also, I'm never told at how big region I should look, and if the whole graph is wavy, going up and down and up and down, should I mark all as planets, or I should say that there are no visible possibilities? They are leaving it all for our intuition to work out, and I don't think that human intuition is good at those.
Astronomers have been looking for alien worlds for more than 15 years, and now you too can join the search.
Yes, and I also could have joined a world-wide search for extra-terrestial life back in 1999 when SETI@Home was launched... (I realize the goal and approach of this planet project is different)
It's a lot of fun - have been playing with it for the last 24 hours - until it got slashdotted :(
At the moment they've only got 35 days of data - that means you're only going to reliably spot planets with fast orbits of less than around 10 days. You've only got about a 10% chance of spotting a planet with a 365 day orbital period. Later they hope to increase this to 120 days as the Kepler mission releases more data.
It's not only planet searching that's interesting - you're looking at the light curve of stars and you see all kinds of odd stuff, from stars that have really random brightness peturbations, to stars that have oddly regular variations. Then there are things like eclipsing binaries that create complex waveforms and then stuff that's hard for an amateur like me to make head of tail of. If you've ever enjoyed backyard astronomy, this is great and very addictive.
There are some rough edges - it's a bit hard to get started as you feel you don't know what you're looking at at first, and the interface will need some improvements, but it's early days yet and they're already doing some great stuff and building on the back of other project like galaxy zoo, so I'm keen to keep at it for a bit.
In the constellation of Cygnus,
There lurks a mysterious, invisible force
The Black Hole
Of Cygnus X-1
Six Stars of the Northern Cross
In mourning for their sister's loss
In a final flash of glory
Nevermore to grace the night...
Just download the latest version of LOIC and join the fun.
HURD - Hurd's Under Research & Development
The interface sucks, and it feels more like something that belongs on a web developer's demo site than anything else.
I sure hope my tax dollars are not paying for this. If they are, I have been suckered.
So how does this relate/compare to BOINC...? I gather one doesn't want to run both of them simultaneously...
We live, as we dream -- alone....
It seems like there's a whole lot they could do with filters, spectrum analysis, etc. Some of those tools might be useful to provide to their users.
Heck, you could probably train a classifier to pick up on a lot of this stuff (although maybe they're planning on using the results of this experiment as training samples for just such a classifier).
... but if you have some spare computing power, PLEASE consider donating it to something that can help those of us who live on earth, like Folding@Home
Why are you letting these clowns ruin our country?
I have RPI's Milkyway@home as my desktop screensaver. Maybe they can do something similar? I would gladly participate my CPU time if they can find an automated way to look for these planets.
When your site doesn’t support eh second most popular browser and does support the least programmer friendly one (safari) I have to pass purely on principal. Personally I use multiple browsers, but this is obviously a political statement on the projects part, not a technical limitation. If they get off of the horse and slip into reality I may reconsider.
A worldwide planet search? Seems like everyone would find it at about the same time.
"Hey! Here it is right here! It's almost like we were standing on it!"
"Join a planetwide world search" would also work. :)
I used to be a SETI At Home enthusiast. When it first came out, it was really cool, seeing all those flashy graphics as it worked. I even turned off auto-sleep on my Mac just so it could work day in and day out on the thing. Then they pulled it, and replaced the app with some bastardized Linux-ized piece of crap that was anything but simple to install & use. (Whoever "they" are.) I haven't looked into this planet-hunter app yet, but I sure hope it's more like the original SETI than what is available now.
If I didn't have absolutely NOTHING to do, I wouldn't be here.
shouldn't it be "universe" wide search? I know, doesn't have the same ring to it... but still..