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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.
If they let the person whose computer found a planet name it, I'm sure they'd get lots of people.
Not on Slashdot, they won't. No way they will let a planet be named "Goatse".
its called the slashdot effect.
______ Eagles may fly but monkeys don't get sucked into jet engines.
They're very generous about it: As soon as you plant a flag, it's yours.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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?
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 .
Listen up kids, today we're going to learn about:
Planet Colbert
Planet 4chan
Planet McDonalds
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.
I hope my tax dollars are paying for this.
What I don't get is why all this money is being spent to look for some planet we will never ever reach in the far side of Alpha who the fuck knowswheresville, when there are plenty of things we could be doing closer to home that doesn't have enough funding like...ohh I don't know...looking for the big ugly rocks that can KILL US ALL very very dead if they hit? Or detecting and cataloging which big ugly rocks have resources we could use, along with testing ways we could snatch said resources to help with our dwindling resources down here?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not one of these "spend everything on the ground!" types, and know that many cool things we use every day was cooked up by NASA (although I DO think NASA shouldn't be allowed to be affected by congress, because then we end up with clusterfucks like the Shuttle having a bazillion pieces being built all over the place so congressman dumbfuckus can bring home the bacon) it just seems to me we always blow money on the "holy shit, that's cool" kind of stuff while ignoring the "shouldn't we be doing this instead?" kinds of things. I mean last I heard something like less than 30% of the sky is actively monitored for nasties headed our way. I'd say until that number was damned close to 100% we shouldn't even be caring if some star a bazillion light years away has a hot Jupiter or not. Am I missing something here?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.