Date: March 16, 2011
Title: SCOPE – Citizen Science in Spectroscopy
Podcaster: Christi Whitworth
Organizations: SCOPE – scope.pari.edu
Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI) – www.pari.edu
Description: SCOPE, Stellar Classification Online Public Exploration is a citizen science program housed at Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute (PARI). Created from spectral images housed at PARI’s Astronomical Photographic Data Archive, this project engages users to classify stars based on the visible spectrum. It is a wonderful way to experience the accomplishment of classifying stars and learning about them in the same way astronomers like Annie Jump Cannon did.
Bio: Christi Whitworth is Education Director at PARI. She is joined by Thurburn Barker, Director of PARI’s Astronomical Photographic Data Archive, and Dr. Michael Castelaz, Science Director to discuss SCOPE and why the classification generated are important to the astronomy community.
Today’s sponsor: This episode of 365 Days of Astronomy is sponsored anonymously and dedicated to the memory of Annie Cameron, at the time of NASA EPOXI flyby of Comet 103P/Hartley 0.0.155 AU above Tryphena, Great Barrier Island, New Zealand, located between Betelgeuse and Procyon on the edge of Canis Minor 4 November 2010.
Transcript:
Christi:
Hello, welcome to 365 Days of Astronomy for March 16, 2011. My name is Christi Whitworth and I am education director at Pisgah Astronomical Research Institute. Today we are here to discuss SCOPE, a citizen science project housed at PARI. SCOPE, otherwise known as Stellar Classification On Line Public Exploration is an effort to classify stars from collections in PARI’s astronomical photographic data archive.
PARI is located in the mountains of Western North Carolina about 40 miles west of Asheville. Other staff members here with me to discuss this project are Dr. Michael Castelez, Science Director at PARI and Thurburn Barker, Director of the Astronomical Photographic Data Archive, also known as APDA.
Starting with Thurburn. Thurburn can you tell us more about the collection of astronomical images in APDA?
Thurburn:
PARI’s photographic archive is a historic resource that is of great value to astronomers today. Our photographic library contains images of stars taken from 1898 through 1995.
Christi:
Thanks. Next Thurburn, can you explain to us more about how these images are used in SCOPE?
Thurburn:
Well, this is the fun part. What we use in SCOPE are the spectral plates because the spectral plates are going to tell us about the nature of the star, and I think most people are interested in how do we know what these stars are made of?
The spectral images that are used in SCOPE will help the user, and that’s anyone, students or the general public, that has access to the internet, can log on to SCOPE, learn about spectral identification of stars, then actually look at photographs that we have put on line of spectrum of stars, and identify through a process that allows them to choose from model stars, spectrums that will be very similar to the spectrums on the photographs that we provide from our archive, and go through an interactive process of determining the stellar classification of the star.
After the student has classified the star, the student may actually save the star that he or she has classified, and can retrieve that at any time once they are back into SCOPE.
Christi:
So after using SCOPE, the user actually can know some things about the composition, temperature, and size of the stars they have classified. Now Thurburn, can you describe to us how other astronomers are using the data in these scanned images from APDA.
Thurburn:
The archive can be used to resolve disputes related to the original classification of stellar objects. To correct coordinates as they were originally reported in research papers, to locate stellar objects that are now of interest in current research, such as exo-solar planetary search. And to provide spectral images of similar resolution that are characteristic of instruments that will be aboard the European Space Agency Gaia satellite mission set to launch in 2012.
Christi:
Thanks Thurburn, now lets turn to Dr. Michael Castelez. Mike what can you tell us about the motivation for creating a citizen science project like SCOPE.
Michael:
The citizen science project that was developed as a result of really opening up all these spectra of stars and getting people to do real research looking at stars that no one’s looked at before was the birth of SCOPE. We estimate in the plate center that there are at least a million stars, which have stellar spectra that can be classified.
However, on those plates only about 15% of those stars really are known. The other 85% are just unknown. The spectra are there, but what are the stars?
There could be all sorts of interesting stars that exist that most of them are probably common, but who knows what else exists on some of those plates.
So, what motivated us to actually start SCOPE was to classify nearly a million stars, stars that nobody has ever looked at before. To be honest with you this is a difficult job. As an astronomer here at PARI I actually started the project just by myself, picking up one of the photographic plates that Thurburn described. I put it down on a light table, and with a magnifying glass I thought, “I’m going to classify every star on the plate”. Well there were about 2,000 stars on the plate, and after the first 10, I said to myself , “I am NOT going to classify all the stars on this plate’ There has got to be a better way, and I thought, I know, there are almost 7 billion people in this world, let’s let them do the job. Ah, here we have the beginning of a citizen science project.
Christi:
How did PARI meet the challenge of building a citizen science project like SCOPE?
Mike:
It’s complicated, in terms of how do you develop an interface on the web that is intuitive, easy to use, and provides the scientific results that we want. We were very fortunate that almost at the same time we were thinking about this project, a volunteer showed up at PARI. His name was Warren Bedell. Warren is an expert on web development and user interfaces. I pulled Warren aside and told him about the project we envisioned and he got very excited and went off and started developing a web interface based on what he had learned about stellar spectra.
Once we launched the web site and we launched the ability for anyone in the world to classify stars, our next thought was, “How reliable are the spectra”?
What we’ve done to begin with is actually allow the users to classify stars, which have been previously classified and are in astronomical catalogs. That way we can compare what the user is giving for a particular star to that of one that has been professionally classified.
This is going to be especially important when users are allowed to classify every single star on a plate, even those that have not been previously classified and put in astronomical catalogs.
So as it stands now, SCOPE is an extremely useful tool for classrooms, teachers can have students classify real stellar spectra in real time in the classroom, give the students the experience of actually analyzing data similar to what astronomers do when we look at stars and make similar sort of classifications.
Christi:
So if you’re a user in a classroom setting or a user who chooses to do this for fun or to make a contribution to a larger project, we welcome all of the listeners of 365 Days of Astronomy to participate in SCOPE by joining the website at scope.pari.edu. If you find any problems, please send your feedback to info@pari.edu. Thanks so much for your time, and we look forward to working with all of you in SCOPE.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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