Watch the Twinkling Stars

AAVSO - The American Association of Variable Star Astronomers.

This well-known and respected amateur astronomy group has been collecting data on variable stars for over 95 years.  This data is particularly useful for understanding the lifecycle and behavior of stars, and may even be useful for identifying planets outside our solar system.

Despite the importance of this data, professional astronomers are unable to spend the time needed to regularly watch these stars and analyze their brightness.  AAVSO's stargazers already enjoy scanning the sky and this provides a valuable purpose to an enjoyable hobby.

AAVSO volunteers receive some brief training online and given the tools to accurately measure star brightness.  After an evening of observations the data is sent to AAVSO headquarters where it is combined with nearly 100 years of data, and analyzed by scientists around the globe.

Getting Involved is Easy:
1) Visit www.AAVSO.org and learn more about this exciting group.
2) Review the AAVSO Manual for Visual Observing of Variable Stars available at http://www.aavso.org/publications/manual/.  The manual is available in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and many other common languages.
3) Take your personal telescope into the backyard on a clear night with a pad of paper, pencil, and the star charts described in the manual.
4) Submit data to the AAVSO WebObs system.  Only AFTER submitting the data, review the observations from other volunteers to see how yours compare.  Use this as a learning tool to help "calibrate" your observer's eyes.
5) Take satisfaction in advancing the variable star data available for other scientists (or yourself!) to analyze.


Good luck, and enjoy!

SETI@Home - Home Computers Search for Intelligent Life

This is one of the earliest, most popular, and easy-to-join projects around.  The Search for Extra-Terrestrials at Home (SETI@Home) connects individual personal computers together into a virtual "Supercomputer" capable of performing huge mathematical tasks.  In this case, processing radio-wave signals from outer space to identify potential messages from alien life forms.

Based on the idea that breaking up a huge job into many smaller jobs makes the impossible possible, SETI@home collects massive amounts of data and splits it into tiny chunks for home computers to analyze.  This is all done in the background with spare computing power so these work-units never interferes with your own work. Once downloaded these signals are analyzed for tell-tale signs that they are artificial in nature, not man-made, and don't come from the Earth.  We are looking for a strong signal from a single point in the sky, and may repeat on a regular basis.  This identifies potential candidates for alien signals, and while only the first step it is by far the most intensive (and what the program focuses on).  Once candidates are identified they are sent back to the project team to compare against known signals (to rule out false candidates), searched for in the sky again, and examined further to identify their true nature.  So helping scientists with the big computing tasks let's them focus on the other difficult tasks of separating potential signals from real ones.

We will talk much more about this ground-breaking project in the future, but for now we recommend you stop by and try it for yourself.

Getting Involved is Easy:

1. Visit http://setiathome.ssl.berkely.edu.  Click on "Participate" and then "Download".
2. Your computer will download the BOINC client.  This is a background program that SETI@Home (and many other projects) run on top of.
3. Install BOINC and run the program for the first time. One the main view appears, click on "Add Project".  A new window will appear to guide you through the process.
4. Scroll through the list of available projects (more on these in future posts) and select the bottom one, SETI@Home.  You will now be connected to the project and prompted to create an account for yourself.
5. Once the account is successfully set up, the SETI@Home program and data to analyze will be automatically managed by your computer.  You don't need to do anything else (unless you want to) except enjoy donating your computer time to a worthy cause.

Good luck, and enjoy!

What is the OpenScientist Blog?

This blog is designed to keep people current on all the happenings in citizen science and help them get involved. We will do this by:

1. Promoting new and existing opportunities for people to get involved in citizen science.
   
2. Chronicling the successes, failures, and everyday exploits of the scientists and their projects.
3. Explaining science projects in plain English so everyone can understand the work and help them make meaningful contributions to it. Or at the very least, explain it will enough for everyone to appreciate the work.
   
4. Helping people connect to science projects that they are most interested in.

Every day we will have more information for you. Some days we may link to an exciting news story, other days to a new project being developed, and other days we will take an in-depth look at an existing project and explain it in thorough, but easily understandable, detail.

Announcing the new OpenScientist Blog!

New years bring new possibilities and a new format for OpenScientist. Over the next few weeks this blog will begin chronicling the daily opportunities available in Citizen Science. These are ways for regular people like you and I to aid and even lead the path to new discoveries. And we will be chronicling the many successes coming to this field.

So please stay tuned as we embark on an exciting new journey of discovery together!