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drphilmarshall / Ideas-for-Citizen-Science-in-Astronomy

Ideas for Citizen Science in Astronomy
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Significant omission: the hunt for sungrazing comets #104

Closed JeanTate closed 9 years ago

JeanTate commented 10 years ago

The Sungrazer Project webpage has a short, 15-year retrospective, written in 2010: http://sungrazer.nrl.navy.mil/index.php?p=soho_15yrs

Excerpt: "SOHO is, by far, the greatest comet discoverer in history, with over 1,950 comet discoveries to date. That's more comet discoveries than every other discoverer throughout history, combined! That's right -- well over half of all cataloged comets now bear the name SOHO, mainly thanks to the dedicated group of amateur astronomers who routinely report these objects to me on this website. So in this article I am going to give a run-down of 15 Years of SOHO Comet Observations, and share some of SOHO's "unintentional" successes!" (Today the hunt for sungrazing comets is done with STEREO images as well as SOHO ones).

The work done by amateurs (citizen scientists) predates the original NASA Clickworkers, and may be the first example of amateurs making astronomical discoveries by downloading - principally time-domain - images/video from a remote observing facility, and analyzing them using largely self-developed software (when such was used at all; many discoveries were made by simply eyeballing raw, very noisy, video).

ADS has hundreds of hits with "SOHO" and "comet" in the title alone; though nowhere near all are papers, some certainly are.

This kind of citizen science in astronomy does not fit neatly into the classification structure of the paper; perhaps that's why it was omitted?

drphilmarshall commented 9 years ago

Thanks JeanTate. We'll revisit the existing comet detection sections and see if there isn't room for some discussion of the amateurs role in the SOHO analysis. Sounds like a job for @leighfletcher!

leighfletcher commented 9 years ago

Thanks JeanTate - you're right that this is probably better characterised as passive observing (i.e., it doesn't really fit the active amateur sections of the paper). Nevertheless, we added a brief reference to the amateur discoveries as part of the SunGrazer Comet program, and bolstered it with references to the larger CIOC program (including the upcoming observations of Siding Spring). Thanks for your help!