Podcaster: Beth Johnson, Franck Marchis, and Simon Steel (alternate hosts); Guest: Dr. Ariel Graykowski
Title: SETI Live – A Celestial Collaboration: Unistellar Citizen Scientists Track Comets
Organization: SETI Institute
Link: https://sites.libsyn.com/462636
Description:
Throughout human history, comets have fascinated us. They have gone from signs and portents of bad things to come to well-studied and even visited “dirty snowballs”. Every year, observers search the skies, hoping to discover the Next Big Comet – Halley, Hyakutake, Hale–Bopp, McNaught. From SOHO and LINEAR to ATLAS and IRAS, numerous observatories have continued to add to the count of discovered comets.
But it doesn’t require expensive hardware or spacecraft to make similar observations from your own backyard; telescopes and even binoculars will work – at least for the brightest objects. For members of Unistellar’s Citizen Science Network, however, comets can be seen at faint magnitudes under a range of night sky conditions.
Join Beth Johnson as she welcomes SETI Institute Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Ariel Graykowski to this week’s SETI Live to discuss the results of citizen scientist observations of comets 12P/Pons-Brooks and C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS).
Unistellar’s comet activity program: https://www.unistellar.com/citizen-science/comets/
Bio: Beth Johnson is a communications specialist and social media manager with a degree in physics and master’s work in planetary science. She specializes in meteor showers, icy moons, and anything with volcanoes.
Franck Marchis is a senior planetary astronomer and chair of the exoplanet group at the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute and Chief Scientific Officer and Founder at Unistellar. He has dedicated his work to the study of our solar system, specifically the search for asteroids with moons, using mainly ground-based telescopes equipped with adaptive optics.
Simon Steel is Deputy Director of the Carl Sagan Center for Research at the SETI Institute. As an observational astrophysicist, he specialized in optical spectrophotometry, with an interest in the star formation histories of galaxies.
Dr. Ariel Graykowski is SETI Institute Postdoctoral Fellow
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365 Days of Astronomy
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