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BBC Show Stargazing Live Leads To Exoplanet Discovery
arnodf writes "Tonight BBC's show stargazing live ended after three days of live astronomy with comedian Dara Ó Briain and professor Brian Cox.
Throughout the show they were trying to make the viewers help in finding an exoplanet via Zooniverse. Thanks to the program they managed to get 1,084,760 classifications in 48 hours and two volunteers discovered an exoplanet which now bears their name.
From the planethunters website: 'Thanks to your help and BBC Stargazing, we managed 1,084,760 classifications in 48 hours.
There's still more to do, and more discoveries to be made, so keep clicking!'"
Couldn't NASA get a bit of funding from people who wanted to bid on the rights to name a world? (Unlike copyrights, aren't celestial bodies named FOREVER?).
No, it couldn't. NASA has nothing to do with naming planets. NASA is a US government agency. The US is one among many countries in the world. Funding such an agency of such a country through such a mechanism would come close to the "sell me a star" or "sell me an acre of moonscape" con trick.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
For those outside the UK, BBC2 broadcast them live at 20:00 for three evenings. The first two were fantastic as the skies were clear. LAstnight was pretty cloudy but the experiment where a whole town went 'dark' was amazing. It really showed how much light polltution there is.
Part of the show came from the Uk and another segment came from South Africa. This latter one enabled us to see the milky Way in all its glory.
Real kudos to the Beeb for putting this on at peak times.
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
Why the cynicism? The PlanetHunters site wasn't set up specifically for the show, it was a "citizen science" project running independently (and still is). Users of the site apparently tripled and worked on over a million images in 24 hours which is a pretty awesome amount of help from a three-night show, although I can't find a mention of what is "normal" traffic for the site.
Besides, the show is over now, it was only on for three nights, so there are no more ratings to drive up.
The Beeb have done this sort of thing before: as far as I remember during a documentary on climate changed they encouraged viewers to get involved with a BOINC weather analysis project. The difference there is that BOINC projects don't involve people actively examining the data themselves and it's very hard to separate out individual contributions.
While describing Dara O'Briain as a comedian is accurate, it's worth nothing that he has a degree in mathematics and theoretical physics.. He's not just there for fart jokes.
You'd never get a commercial channel doing live astronomy for 3 nights. In fact they barely tough science at all these days except for the occasional Discovery channel funded sensationalist drivel on channel 5 ("OMG , tidal waves, asteroids, earthquakes, we're all gonna die!! - but find out how after the break" type stuff)
This sort of program alone - almost - makes the license fee worth the money.