Citizen Science - Its Importance to Astronomy

Collect it. Process it. Analyse it. Model it.

More than ever, science needs computing power to do all these things. The telescopes are getting bigger and more sensitive; and the data volume collected by them is becoming massive.

Whilst I have read about Cray super-computers beng developed to handle data aquisition and processing for the SKA and other observatories, there is no doubt that Citizen Science, or Donated Computing as I sometimes call it, will also play a significant role in all this.

Citizen Science costs you nothing and simply uses donated time on your home computer to process research grade scientific data for real astronomers. 

There are two types of Citizen Science:

The first is where the person uses his or her home computer to make decisions about data which is placed on the screen in front of them. Zooniverse is quite successful at doing this and I have tried some of its projects - but it is very time consuming for the user and can be very, very tedious. Good luck to those who persevere with it. It is slow and you cannot devote up to twenty-four hours every day to it.

The second type of Citizen Science utilises the idle time on millions of home computers to churn out scientific results - research grade scientific results - which reduce the computing power needed by scientists. As long as your computer is switched on it will be crunching data. You have complete control to throttle the processing speed, to avoid any detrimental effects whilst the computer is used for other processes and tasks. All the projects you choose to contribute to are managed by BOINC.

Recently a group of home computers participating in the BOINC Einstein@home project found four new gamma-ray pulsars in data from the Large Area Telescope on board NASA's Fermi satellite.

Curtin University and The University of Western Australia run the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), based in Perth, Western Australia.  ICRAR is developing the processing power to be used when the SKA comes on line in 2020. Part of that processing power is harnessing home computing; and currently their BOINC "SkyNet" project is doing just that to combine the UV, Optical and Near Infra-red properties of 100,000 low redshift galaxies into a single catalogue, using Internet-connected home computers. This is the very same work which our guest speaker Dr. Ángel R. López-Sánchez (AAO) spoke to us about at the Macarthur Astronomy Forum in November.

This is a scientific paper about the SkyNet project, evidence that astronomers take Citizen Science very seriously. The professional astronomy community is becoming more and more data driven and relies a lot on Citizen Science for part of its processing power.

I would love to see our own "Macarthur Astronomical Society" Citizen Science Team recruit some new participants. If you are interested in learning about it, please contact me and I will explain a bit more than I can here.