Ideas for Citizen Science in Astronomy

Abstract

We review the relatively new, internet-enabled, and rapidly-evolving field of citizen science, focusing on research projects in stellar, extragalactic and solar system astronomy that have benefited from the participation of members of the public, often in large numbers. We find these volunteers making contributions to astronomy in a variety of ways: making and analyzing new observations, visually classifying features in images and light curves, exploring models constrained by astronomical datasets, and initiating new scientific enquiries. The most productive citizen astronomy projects involve close collaboration between the professionals and amateurs involved, and occupy scientific niches not easily filled by great observatories or machine learning methods: citizen astronomers are most strongly motivated by being of service to science. In the coming years we expect participation and productivity in citizen astronomy to increase, as survey datasets get larger and citizen science platforms become more efficient. Opportunities include engaging the public in ever more advanced analyses, and facilitating citizen-led enquiry by designing professional user interfaces and analysis tools with citizens in mind.Comment: In progress. The most up to date PDF file should be downloaded from http://tinyurl.com/CitizenAstronomyReview . We invite feedback via github issues at http://tinyurl.com/CitizenAstronomyReviewFeedback, and aim to submit to ARAA on September 2

Planet Four: Craters—Optimizing task workflow to improve volunteer engagement and crater counting performance

“…), and expert comparison (Marshall et al. ). It could be argued that such approaches are ironic, creating extra work for the scientist involved within a system predominantly designed to reduce their workload.…”

“…Data can be contaminated in a number of ways, such as false-positive identifications, missing identifications (Tar and Thacker 2015), and issues regarding the measurement of smaller craters (Robbins et al 2014), all of which contribute to reduce the usefulness of citizen science data sets to the scientific community. In order to combat this problem, a number of retrospective techniques have been proposed to "clean up" the data set, including data filtering ), modeling error rates , and expert comparison (Marshall et al 2015). It could be argued that such approaches are ironic, creating extra work for the scientist involved within a system predominantly designed to reduce their workload.…”

COSMOGRAIL: the COSmological MOnitoring of GRAvItational Lenses

“…This method is based on visual inspection of the light curves, in the spirit of citizen science projects (e.g., see the review by Marshall et al 2015). To ease this process, we developed a dedicated browser-based visualization interface, using the D3.js JavaScript library 1 by Bostock et al (2011).…”

Tracking Galaxy Evolution Through Low-Frequency Radio Continuum Observations using SKA and Citizen-Science Research using Multi-Wavelength Data

“…Till the writing of this paper Zooniverse (www.zooniverse.org) has published 108 research papers and out of which 48 publications have come from extragalactic research by Galaxy Zoo. Recently, an excellent review on citizen-science has been published by Marshall, Lintott & Fletcher (2015). This review discusses its history and promise of its power for future astronomy education, research, and social development.…”