neues BOINC Project
- Ersteller Sir Ulli
- Erstellt am
Sir Ulli
Grand Admiral Special
http://www.planetquest.org/
PlanetQuest relies on the combined computing power of millions of computers in order to process astronomical data. In using this innovative approach, commonly called "distributed computing," we rely on a secure, robust series of servers at our central core to handle requests, store data, and track processing results. The actual data processing, however, takes place on participants' computers all over the world. Together, these machines form a massive virtual supercomputer, allowing PlanetQuesters to use our Transit Detection Algorithm to analyze large astronomical datasets and make new discoveries.
You may be familiar with other distributed computing projects, such as SETI@home. While PlanetQuest shares much in common with SETI@home and similar distributed computing projects, PlanetQuest is also quite different!
* PlanetQuest makes you the astronomer. We send you the raw data, but you make the discoveries and receive credit for them. The PlanetQuest Collaboratory will list your newly classified stars or potentially detected planets in our central PlanetQuest Discoveries Catalog, and give you the credit for what you've found. You will be making new scientific discoveries and will be contributing directly to cutting-edge astronomical research.
* Want to learn more about science, astronomy, the Drake Equation? The resources are a click away in your PlanetQuest Collaboratory. You choose how deeply you want to explore—from introductory lessons to cutting-edge academic articles and multimedia content. Learn at your own level and pace—and take your understanding as far as you would like.
* PlanetQuest software is a virtual astronomy lab on your computer, allowing you to run experiments on a given star. Or you can choose to let PlanetQuest make all the decisions for you automatically.
* Have your own telescope? Export your PlanetQuest stars' coordinates and view at home. Have a star party with your friends—they'll be as excited as you are!
http://www.planetquest.org/about/computing/
man kann sich hier mal vormerken lassen
http://www.planetquest.org/newsletter.html
sieht ganz interesant aus...
mfg
Sir Ulli
PlanetQuest relies on the combined computing power of millions of computers in order to process astronomical data. In using this innovative approach, commonly called "distributed computing," we rely on a secure, robust series of servers at our central core to handle requests, store data, and track processing results. The actual data processing, however, takes place on participants' computers all over the world. Together, these machines form a massive virtual supercomputer, allowing PlanetQuesters to use our Transit Detection Algorithm to analyze large astronomical datasets and make new discoveries.
You may be familiar with other distributed computing projects, such as SETI@home. While PlanetQuest shares much in common with SETI@home and similar distributed computing projects, PlanetQuest is also quite different!
* PlanetQuest makes you the astronomer. We send you the raw data, but you make the discoveries and receive credit for them. The PlanetQuest Collaboratory will list your newly classified stars or potentially detected planets in our central PlanetQuest Discoveries Catalog, and give you the credit for what you've found. You will be making new scientific discoveries and will be contributing directly to cutting-edge astronomical research.
* Want to learn more about science, astronomy, the Drake Equation? The resources are a click away in your PlanetQuest Collaboratory. You choose how deeply you want to explore—from introductory lessons to cutting-edge academic articles and multimedia content. Learn at your own level and pace—and take your understanding as far as you would like.
* PlanetQuest software is a virtual astronomy lab on your computer, allowing you to run experiments on a given star. Or you can choose to let PlanetQuest make all the decisions for you automatically.
* Have your own telescope? Export your PlanetQuest stars' coordinates and view at home. Have a star party with your friends—they'll be as excited as you are!
http://www.planetquest.org/about/computing/
man kann sich hier mal vormerken lassen
http://www.planetquest.org/newsletter.html
sieht ganz interesant aus...
mfg
Sir Ulli
PlanetQuest—A Public Science Nonprofit—Acquires $20 Million
British Entrepreneur Dill Faulkes Joins Board and Contributes Telescopes
April 29, 2005 (Menlo Park, CA)—PlanetQuest, a nonprofit that plans to bring the thrill of scientific discovery to children as well as to "astronomers" of all ages by developing free software for public science, just obtained access to a $20 million project from new PlanetQuest board member and British software entrepreneur Dill Faulkes. The project comprises two identical, world-class 2-meter telescopes—one in Maui, Hawaii and the other in Siding Spring, Australia—that Faulkes built for a math and science education venture he created and funded in Great Britain in the late '90s called the Faulkes Telescope Project. Both telescopes can be operated robotically and controlled over the Internet using a normal PC.
PlanetQuest was founded last year by astrophysicist Laurance Doyle, social scientist David Gutelius, and software entrepreneur Jeremy Crandell to build free software called the Collaboratory that enables people to discover new planets and other astronomical phenomena. The Collaboratory features a transit detection algorithm that was created by Doyle and two other astronomers a decade ago and is used to detect the transit of planets across the disc of stars, a technique that has led to the discovery of five extrasolar planets to date. Using the data collected from telescopes and the power of thousands of home computers crunching the data in a process known as distributed computing, PlanetQuest users will make new discoveries about stars and also find planets for the first time, while learning about math and science in the process.
"This is public science in the best sense," said Gutelius, who is executive director of the project. "It’s real people, doing real science, making real discoveries. We estimate that at least one in 5,000 will find a planet, but the Collaboratory will allow everyone to discover something."
PlanetQuest will launch a limited soft beta product in the winter quarter of 2005–06, and eventually plans to enlist data from as many as 10 dedicated telescopes around the world to serve 20 million planet seekers. For more information on the project, see http://www.planetquest.org.
The Faulkes 2-meter telescopes join PlanetQuest’s growing observatory network that includes the oldest professional reflecting telescope in the world (the Crossley 0.9 meter at Lick Observatory); a 1-meter telescope at Siding Spring, Australia; the PASS array in the Canary Islands; and the Vulcan South telescope at the South Pole. The nonprofit has also been invited to join the observing consortium at the Calar Alto Observatory in Spain and the SMARTS consortium at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.
Faulkes, who earned a PhD in mathematics at London University and did postdoctoral work on general relativity, bemoans the decline of science education in Europe and has put his considerable wealth into disrupting that trend.
"I believe that together, PlanetQuest and the Faulkes Telescopes can make an enormous difference in the future orientation of millions of young people in the world today," Faulkes said. "Together, we will not only discover new planets but also discover and promote the scientific creativity that lies within all of us."
A highly successful investor in software companies, he launched the Dill Faulkes Educational Trust in 1998 to support education programs designed to inspire young people in science and math. In recognition of his contribution to science education, an asteroid—the 47144 Faulkes—was recently named after him.
British Entrepreneur Dill Faulkes Joins Board and Contributes Telescopes
April 29, 2005 (Menlo Park, CA)—PlanetQuest, a nonprofit that plans to bring the thrill of scientific discovery to children as well as to "astronomers" of all ages by developing free software for public science, just obtained access to a $20 million project from new PlanetQuest board member and British software entrepreneur Dill Faulkes. The project comprises two identical, world-class 2-meter telescopes—one in Maui, Hawaii and the other in Siding Spring, Australia—that Faulkes built for a math and science education venture he created and funded in Great Britain in the late '90s called the Faulkes Telescope Project. Both telescopes can be operated robotically and controlled over the Internet using a normal PC.
PlanetQuest was founded last year by astrophysicist Laurance Doyle, social scientist David Gutelius, and software entrepreneur Jeremy Crandell to build free software called the Collaboratory that enables people to discover new planets and other astronomical phenomena. The Collaboratory features a transit detection algorithm that was created by Doyle and two other astronomers a decade ago and is used to detect the transit of planets across the disc of stars, a technique that has led to the discovery of five extrasolar planets to date. Using the data collected from telescopes and the power of thousands of home computers crunching the data in a process known as distributed computing, PlanetQuest users will make new discoveries about stars and also find planets for the first time, while learning about math and science in the process.
"This is public science in the best sense," said Gutelius, who is executive director of the project. "It’s real people, doing real science, making real discoveries. We estimate that at least one in 5,000 will find a planet, but the Collaboratory will allow everyone to discover something."
PlanetQuest will launch a limited soft beta product in the winter quarter of 2005–06, and eventually plans to enlist data from as many as 10 dedicated telescopes around the world to serve 20 million planet seekers. For more information on the project, see http://www.planetquest.org.
The Faulkes 2-meter telescopes join PlanetQuest’s growing observatory network that includes the oldest professional reflecting telescope in the world (the Crossley 0.9 meter at Lick Observatory); a 1-meter telescope at Siding Spring, Australia; the PASS array in the Canary Islands; and the Vulcan South telescope at the South Pole. The nonprofit has also been invited to join the observing consortium at the Calar Alto Observatory in Spain and the SMARTS consortium at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.
Faulkes, who earned a PhD in mathematics at London University and did postdoctoral work on general relativity, bemoans the decline of science education in Europe and has put his considerable wealth into disrupting that trend.
"I believe that together, PlanetQuest and the Faulkes Telescopes can make an enormous difference in the future orientation of millions of young people in the world today," Faulkes said. "Together, we will not only discover new planets but also discover and promote the scientific creativity that lies within all of us."
A highly successful investor in software companies, he launched the Dill Faulkes Educational Trust in 1998 to support education programs designed to inspire young people in science and math. In recognition of his contribution to science education, an asteroid—the 47144 Faulkes—was recently named after him.
Sir Ulli
Grand Admiral Special
Friends of PlanetQuest Newsletter Vol 1, No 4
**The PlanetQuest Mission: To inspire the people of the world with the thrill of individual discovery, a better understanding of our uniquely precious planet, and a wider perspective on our place in the universe.**
Dear Friends,
May has turned out to be a month of hard work. During the past month, we have begun work on incorporating translations of some of our pages, added a new director to our board, hosted a star party at Lick Observatory (well, it was a cloud party spiced with historical observations!) with a UC Light and Optics class of Dr. Doyle’s, added to the website, and begun equipment modifications on our telescopes.
We are forging ahead, looking forward to a very busy summer, and looking forward to telling you, our friends and supporters, all about it.
...
We are pleased to announce that PlanetQuest and the SETI Institute (http://www.seti.org) are joining forces. SETI Institute will provide materials and technical support for the PlanetQuest mission, and the two organizations will participate in selected joint fundraising efforts. This is not only a mutually beneficial but also extremely natural collaboration. For many years, SETI Institute has been engaged in a radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and has now expanded that search with an optical component. SETI also supported early distributed computing projects (SETI@home) that many of you may have participated in, and that has provided the foundation for the PlanetQuest Collaboratory. We are extremely excited about our two organizations working together to bring the excitement of discovery to you.
und
From PlanetQuest, software for stargazers
8)
mfg
Sir Ulli
**The PlanetQuest Mission: To inspire the people of the world with the thrill of individual discovery, a better understanding of our uniquely precious planet, and a wider perspective on our place in the universe.**
Dear Friends,
May has turned out to be a month of hard work. During the past month, we have begun work on incorporating translations of some of our pages, added a new director to our board, hosted a star party at Lick Observatory (well, it was a cloud party spiced with historical observations!) with a UC Light and Optics class of Dr. Doyle’s, added to the website, and begun equipment modifications on our telescopes.
We are forging ahead, looking forward to a very busy summer, and looking forward to telling you, our friends and supporters, all about it.
...
We are pleased to announce that PlanetQuest and the SETI Institute (http://www.seti.org) are joining forces. SETI Institute will provide materials and technical support for the PlanetQuest mission, and the two organizations will participate in selected joint fundraising efforts. This is not only a mutually beneficial but also extremely natural collaboration. For many years, SETI Institute has been engaged in a radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and has now expanded that search with an optical component. SETI also supported early distributed computing projects (SETI@home) that many of you may have participated in, and that has provided the foundation for the PlanetQuest Collaboratory. We are extremely excited about our two organizations working together to bring the excitement of discovery to you.
und
From PlanetQuest, software for stargazers
8)
mfg
Sir Ulli
Sir Ulli
Grand Admiral Special
Friends of PlanetQuest Newsletter Vol 1, No 5
**The PlanetQuest Mission: To inspire the people of the world with the thrill of individual discovery, a better understanding of our uniquely precious planet, and a wider perspective on our place in the universe.**
Dear Friends,
It seems every time we send out our Newsletter, some big event happens, and we have to wait for the following issue to tell you about it. Right after our last issue, CNET News.com published a fine article about us on their website! (See the link below.)
This last month, our observing astronomer Dr. Robert Slawson arrived at Siding Spring, Australia to begin a month-long run observing in Baade’s Window (see his excellent report below), and a few days ago, we received our R (red) filter for the Crossley telescope at Lick Observatory. We also continue to make progress with the development of the Collaboratory, several new Learn pages have been added to our website, and we are very close to putting up some of our pages in German! Many thanks to those helping us with these projects, and thank you Friends of PlanetQuest for your continued interest and support.
===================================
**News!
“Astrophysicist Laurance Doyle wants to get the world discovering worlds—and in the process get children jazzed about science and math.
“With record low test scores in the sciences in the United States, American schoolchildren are lagging behind youth of other nationalities and causing concern about the future of the country’s thought leaders and astronomical discoverers. That concern has driven Doyle and his team at nonprofit PlanetQuest to develop software to harness the computing power of millions and help people discover new planets and stars.”
With these words, CNET News.com staff writer Stefanie Olsen began an excellent article on PlanetQuest dated May 31, 2005. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can read the full text at http://news.com.com/from+planetquest,+software+for+stargazers/2100-1008_3-5726511.html?tag=nefd.lede.
**Our Education Project**
We’re quite pleased with the progress of our Learn pages (http://www.planetquest.org/learn/) on the website, and have just added nine new pages on cultural and historical aspects of astronomy, as well as archaeoastronomy sites throughout the world. We have many more scheduled for completion in the coming weeks and months, and hope you will enjoy them. We welcome any suggestions you may have for other topics.
**The Collaboratory**
We continue working hard to bring the Collaboratory to life. PlanetQuest cofounder Dr. David Gutelius is working with a team of design experts on the look and feel, and David Rowland has made significant progress in translating the ideas into OpenGL BOINC project. Programmer Dr. Jay Doane is working with our resident signal detection expert, Dr. Jon Jenkins, on optimizing the algorithms we’ll be using in the Collaboratory. Our alpha test runs are looking strong so far, and we are on track for our Beta testing program late this year.
**Astronomy and Observing**
As noted above, our astronomer Bob Slawson is at Siding Spring, Australia observing in the region of the sky known as Baade’s Window. For a good look at Baade’s Window, see http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap021223.html. Imagine trying to identify an individual star in that region! But that’s precisely why we are observing there—the more stars, the better the chances of finding a planet. As you can see, the software designed to sort out all the variations in light received by our CCDs from each one of those stars has to be extremely complex and sophisticated, and that is why the Collaboratory is so important.
Bob has reported that Siding Spring greeted him with quite a bit of rain the first few days, but then he was able to get some data. There have been some fairly minor technical details that needed to be worked out, but it sounds like he’s settling in, and if the weather proves more cooperative, he should be able to obtain a reasonable amount of data for PlanetQuesters to analyze. These observations will also be used to study a technique codeveloped by Laurance Doyle, Hans Deeg, and Jean Schneider using eclipsing binary stars to discover planets. To see live how the weather is for observing at Siding Spring, try this site: http://nightskylive.net/sd/
Here is Bob’s report:
FIRST WEEK AND A HALF OF PLANETQUEST AT SIDING SPRING OBSERVATORY
Wednesday, June 29: More rain is falling. Managed to get 2 nights of data earlier this week although only 1 of the nights was “photometric.” Those are the only usable nights out of the first 12.
The field that we are monitoring is known as Baade’s Window, a line-of-sight toward the center of the Milky Way with surprisingly little interstellar dust. Dust absorbs and scatters starlight, dimming and reddening the stars. As a result of the lack of extinction and the concentration of stars toward the Galactic center, there are a high number of stars accessible with only a modest-sized research telescope. At the southern hemisphere latitude of SSO, Baade’s Window passes nearly overhead around midnight at the end of June. So this is the optimal time, astronomically, to be here.
The telescope is a 40-inch Boller & Chivens built in 1963 owned and maintained by the Australian National University, Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. On the telescope, we’re using the Wide Field Imager, a camera built 6 years ago that consists of 8 4K x 2K CCDs arranged as an 8K x 8K pixel mosaic. (Unfortunately, one of the CCDs is no longer working.) With such a large focal plane, 3/4 of a square degree of the sky can be imaged at a time. Each raw image produces a data file of 140 Mb.
The primary scientific goal of the observing project is to try and detect the presence of third bodies orbiting around eclipsing binary systems. Eclipsing binaries are two stars in close orbit about each other but that, since they are far away, appear as only one star in the sky. Their mutual orbit is oriented so that when one passes in front of the other, some or all of the light from the other as seen from Earth, is blocked. This results in a periodic dimming of the light from the “star” that can be accurately measured. An unseen third body, a Jupiter-sized planet perhaps, orbiting around the pair should induce small changes in the time of the eclipse depending on its size and distance from the stars. To date, no planets have been found by this method so we are hoping for a first.
The weather, however, has not been good for astronomy. As of yesterday, 137.8 mm (5.4 inches) of rain has been recorded falling on Coonabarabran, the nearby town of some 3000 persons. More is falling here as I write and there was even some snow up at the observatory at the end of last week. Tough on astronomers but very good for farmers. Australia has been suffering from a 5 year drought, the worst on record. Last year the total rainfall in Coonabarabran for the entire month of June was only 26.2 mm and the average rainfall for June for the last 125 years is only 56.1 mm or about 2.2 inches.
Three more nights for this half of the run, then 4 nights off to let someone who really needs moonless nights use the telescope. After that another 15 nights in Baade’s Window. --- Bob Slawson
**Our Fundraising Efforts**
Recent fundraising efforts have focused on becoming more well-known through such articles as the ones by CNET’s News.com and Wired.com. We are hoping to excite potential donors about this cutting-edge, educational science project, the first ever with the potential to involve millions of people, from all cultures and regions, in the search for extrasolar planets. If you too would like to make a difference in and bring positive change to our world, please consider a contribution (we’ve made this easy: just go to http://www.planetquest.org/support/donate), and tell your friends about us. For as little as $10 per month, you can help us build PlanetQuest into the world-changing organization it can be! For those thinking of contributing on a large scale, we are happy to meet with you and explain our project in more detail. We are a registered 501(c)(3) US nonprofit organization, so your donations are completely tax-deductible. As always, thank you for your interest, enthusiasm and support!
===================================
**Quote of the Month**
“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.”
Carl Sagan
===================================
Best Wishes,
J. Ellen Blue
Director of Publications
Laurance Doyle, PhD
President and Cofounder
David Gutelius, PhD
Executive Director and Cofounder
To unsubscribe to our newsletter, please click on this link: mailto:info@planetquest.org?subject=unsubscribe or reply to this email with “unsubscribe” in the subject line.
mfg
Sir Ulli
**The PlanetQuest Mission: To inspire the people of the world with the thrill of individual discovery, a better understanding of our uniquely precious planet, and a wider perspective on our place in the universe.**
Dear Friends,
It seems every time we send out our Newsletter, some big event happens, and we have to wait for the following issue to tell you about it. Right after our last issue, CNET News.com published a fine article about us on their website! (See the link below.)
This last month, our observing astronomer Dr. Robert Slawson arrived at Siding Spring, Australia to begin a month-long run observing in Baade’s Window (see his excellent report below), and a few days ago, we received our R (red) filter for the Crossley telescope at Lick Observatory. We also continue to make progress with the development of the Collaboratory, several new Learn pages have been added to our website, and we are very close to putting up some of our pages in German! Many thanks to those helping us with these projects, and thank you Friends of PlanetQuest for your continued interest and support.
===================================
**News!
“Astrophysicist Laurance Doyle wants to get the world discovering worlds—and in the process get children jazzed about science and math.
“With record low test scores in the sciences in the United States, American schoolchildren are lagging behind youth of other nationalities and causing concern about the future of the country’s thought leaders and astronomical discoverers. That concern has driven Doyle and his team at nonprofit PlanetQuest to develop software to harness the computing power of millions and help people discover new planets and stars.”
With these words, CNET News.com staff writer Stefanie Olsen began an excellent article on PlanetQuest dated May 31, 2005. If you haven’t seen it yet, you can read the full text at http://news.com.com/from+planetquest,+software+for+stargazers/2100-1008_3-5726511.html?tag=nefd.lede.
**Our Education Project**
We’re quite pleased with the progress of our Learn pages (http://www.planetquest.org/learn/) on the website, and have just added nine new pages on cultural and historical aspects of astronomy, as well as archaeoastronomy sites throughout the world. We have many more scheduled for completion in the coming weeks and months, and hope you will enjoy them. We welcome any suggestions you may have for other topics.
**The Collaboratory**
We continue working hard to bring the Collaboratory to life. PlanetQuest cofounder Dr. David Gutelius is working with a team of design experts on the look and feel, and David Rowland has made significant progress in translating the ideas into OpenGL BOINC project. Programmer Dr. Jay Doane is working with our resident signal detection expert, Dr. Jon Jenkins, on optimizing the algorithms we’ll be using in the Collaboratory. Our alpha test runs are looking strong so far, and we are on track for our Beta testing program late this year.
**Astronomy and Observing**
As noted above, our astronomer Bob Slawson is at Siding Spring, Australia observing in the region of the sky known as Baade’s Window. For a good look at Baade’s Window, see http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap021223.html. Imagine trying to identify an individual star in that region! But that’s precisely why we are observing there—the more stars, the better the chances of finding a planet. As you can see, the software designed to sort out all the variations in light received by our CCDs from each one of those stars has to be extremely complex and sophisticated, and that is why the Collaboratory is so important.
Bob has reported that Siding Spring greeted him with quite a bit of rain the first few days, but then he was able to get some data. There have been some fairly minor technical details that needed to be worked out, but it sounds like he’s settling in, and if the weather proves more cooperative, he should be able to obtain a reasonable amount of data for PlanetQuesters to analyze. These observations will also be used to study a technique codeveloped by Laurance Doyle, Hans Deeg, and Jean Schneider using eclipsing binary stars to discover planets. To see live how the weather is for observing at Siding Spring, try this site: http://nightskylive.net/sd/
Here is Bob’s report:
FIRST WEEK AND A HALF OF PLANETQUEST AT SIDING SPRING OBSERVATORY
Wednesday, June 29: More rain is falling. Managed to get 2 nights of data earlier this week although only 1 of the nights was “photometric.” Those are the only usable nights out of the first 12.
The field that we are monitoring is known as Baade’s Window, a line-of-sight toward the center of the Milky Way with surprisingly little interstellar dust. Dust absorbs and scatters starlight, dimming and reddening the stars. As a result of the lack of extinction and the concentration of stars toward the Galactic center, there are a high number of stars accessible with only a modest-sized research telescope. At the southern hemisphere latitude of SSO, Baade’s Window passes nearly overhead around midnight at the end of June. So this is the optimal time, astronomically, to be here.
The telescope is a 40-inch Boller & Chivens built in 1963 owned and maintained by the Australian National University, Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics. On the telescope, we’re using the Wide Field Imager, a camera built 6 years ago that consists of 8 4K x 2K CCDs arranged as an 8K x 8K pixel mosaic. (Unfortunately, one of the CCDs is no longer working.) With such a large focal plane, 3/4 of a square degree of the sky can be imaged at a time. Each raw image produces a data file of 140 Mb.
The primary scientific goal of the observing project is to try and detect the presence of third bodies orbiting around eclipsing binary systems. Eclipsing binaries are two stars in close orbit about each other but that, since they are far away, appear as only one star in the sky. Their mutual orbit is oriented so that when one passes in front of the other, some or all of the light from the other as seen from Earth, is blocked. This results in a periodic dimming of the light from the “star” that can be accurately measured. An unseen third body, a Jupiter-sized planet perhaps, orbiting around the pair should induce small changes in the time of the eclipse depending on its size and distance from the stars. To date, no planets have been found by this method so we are hoping for a first.
The weather, however, has not been good for astronomy. As of yesterday, 137.8 mm (5.4 inches) of rain has been recorded falling on Coonabarabran, the nearby town of some 3000 persons. More is falling here as I write and there was even some snow up at the observatory at the end of last week. Tough on astronomers but very good for farmers. Australia has been suffering from a 5 year drought, the worst on record. Last year the total rainfall in Coonabarabran for the entire month of June was only 26.2 mm and the average rainfall for June for the last 125 years is only 56.1 mm or about 2.2 inches.
Three more nights for this half of the run, then 4 nights off to let someone who really needs moonless nights use the telescope. After that another 15 nights in Baade’s Window. --- Bob Slawson
**Our Fundraising Efforts**
Recent fundraising efforts have focused on becoming more well-known through such articles as the ones by CNET’s News.com and Wired.com. We are hoping to excite potential donors about this cutting-edge, educational science project, the first ever with the potential to involve millions of people, from all cultures and regions, in the search for extrasolar planets. If you too would like to make a difference in and bring positive change to our world, please consider a contribution (we’ve made this easy: just go to http://www.planetquest.org/support/donate), and tell your friends about us. For as little as $10 per month, you can help us build PlanetQuest into the world-changing organization it can be! For those thinking of contributing on a large scale, we are happy to meet with you and explain our project in more detail. We are a registered 501(c)(3) US nonprofit organization, so your donations are completely tax-deductible. As always, thank you for your interest, enthusiasm and support!
===================================
**Quote of the Month**
“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.”
Carl Sagan
===================================
Best Wishes,
J. Ellen Blue
Director of Publications
Laurance Doyle, PhD
President and Cofounder
David Gutelius, PhD
Executive Director and Cofounder
To unsubscribe to our newsletter, please click on this link: mailto:info@planetquest.org?subject=unsubscribe or reply to this email with “unsubscribe” in the subject line.
mfg
Sir Ulli
PlanetQuest Collaboratory Newsletter
April 2006
"We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened."
- Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn
Dear Friends of PlanetQuest:
Hello to all of you once again, with our apologies for such a long silence! Much happened during the last part of 2005 and start of 2006, as you will read about below. There were changes in our organizational structure and personnel, two successful observing runs in the northern and southern hemispheres, and significant progress in the development of the Collaboratory software. Our special thanks to you all for your continued support!
PQ Personnel News
New Executive Director
Dr. David Gutelius has left PlanetQuest as Executive Director to pursue his many projects, including teaching at Stanford University and working on economics in the Arab world. We have greatly appreciated his expertise in getting the PlanetQuest project off the ground and set up for business. All the best Dave!
Our new Executive Director is Brad Silen, owner of Quality Process, a computer software development company, which is now working closely with PlanetQuest to produce the codes for analysis of stellar photometric types, BOINC updates needed to distribute the planet finding to you, and interface with our new star catalogue. Brad has degrees in Engineering and Philosophy! Welcome Brad!
Thanks to Outgoing Personnel
We thank Dr. Jay Doane, one of our programmers, who moves on to other projects after working on the first stages of the single-star transit detection algorithm (TDA) for PlanetQuest. We wish him all the very best in his new pursuits!
We thank Sylvia Paull, our first fundraiser; we have appreciated working with Sylvia and meeting many of her contacts in the software development and science education fields. We appreciated her cheerful and upbeat approach toward obtaining funding for PlanetQuest.
Welcome to New Personnel
Welcome to Dr. Craig Linberg, our new physicist. His PhD is in signal detection and estimation. He has been working with both the eclipsing binary transit modeler, as well as the planet detection algorithms. He brings a special knowledge of subnoise detection methods that will allow us (actually you!) to push the limits of planet detection down to smaller and smaller sizes as we obtain more data. Welcome Craig!
Astronomical Observing - Siding Spring and Lick Observatories
We have completed a one-month run at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia, gathering data from stars in the galactic center (the region known as "Baade's Window"), which has the densest number of stars in the sky, with the exception of globular clusters (stars in globular clusters appear to be too poor in heavy elements to have any planets form around them, judging from surveys of both 47 Tuc and omega Centauri). We have chosen Baade's Window as it is the densest region in the night sky (in both hemispheres) and has been the target of the OGLE (optical gravitational lensing experiment) project, which indicates that there are at least 170 million stars that can be observed there down to 18th magnitude. We used the 1.0-meter telescope at Siding Spring, which has a wide field imager covering a 52 x 52 arc-minute field of view (i.e., almost a square degree!)
We have also completed our observing run with our newly designed and built focal-reducing lens and prime-focus imaging system (which widened our field of view to 40 x 40 arc-minutes) on the Crossley telescope at Lick Observatory. Our special thanks to Drs. Robert Slawson (PlanetQuest astronomer) and Zoran Ninkov (PlanetQuest board member) for the design and quality control. The new system was mounted at the prime focus of the Crossley telescope and performed perfectly over our one-month observing run, allowing us to obtain excellent photometric precision down to about magnitude 19. We observed low-galactic-latitude regions to maximize the number of stars available for PlanetQuesting, some centered in open clusters like NGC 559, since planets discovered in star clusters can also be dated. (We shall outline how this is done on our website shortly - the basic idea is that the color of stars in a cluster can give a rather good idea of its age.) The field here was in the constellation
Cassiopeia. The Crossley telescope was the world's first modern (metal-on-glass) professional-sized (0.9-meter) reflecting telescope, built in the 1870s and given to Lick Observatory in 1895, and still works very well with our state-of-the-art optical-mechanical-imaging system. We used a back-lit UV-sensitive 16 million pixel square array along with the Stromvil stellar classification system filters (a mix of the Stromgren and Vilnius photometric systems) so that we may preclassify, photometrically, the stars you are going to look for planets around.
Collaboratory
We have found that the analysis of eclipsing binary star systems (double stars that orbit close to each other oriented in such a way as to eclipse each other across our line of sight) for planetary transits will take a significant amount of computational time but that these should be prime targets for planet detection as one will get at least two transit events every orbit of the planet. We now have eclipsing binary stellar classification software running and ready to be integrated into the TDA (transit detection algorithm) and converted to the BOINC format for distribution to you by, hopefully, early this fall. The detection of eclipsing binary transits was pioneered by three PlanetQuest scientists - Dr. Hans Deeg (of the Canary Islands Astrophysical Institute), Dr. Jon Jenkins (of the SETI Institute) and Dr. Laurance Doyle (of PlanetQuest).
We expect to be able to have a beta test ready soon. Stay tuned for this development! Our goal is a release you can try out by early this fall, when we can also expect to have enough data to accommodate 10,000 or more users.
Education
We have made an informal agreement with the NASA PlanetQuest project (the name of a new spacecraft mission formerly known as SIM - Space Interferometry Mission) to promote each other's websites (ours to be referred to as the "PlanetQuest Collaboratory" and theirs to be known as "SIM PlanetQuest"). We look forward to mutually promoting and assisting each other in bringing exciting educational experiences to you!
We shall continue to add to our "Astronomy in All Cultures" essays on the website with the goal of having a global interactive tool for learning more about the astronomy of indigenous peoples around the world. We have a multitude of interesting ideas and sources of graphical educational material we will be bringing to you soon, including (we expect) illustrations from a National Geographic television program on habitable planets in which Dr. Doyle was interviewed as a guest scientist and also helped to write the script. The show was called "Extraterrestrial" in the United States and "Alien Worlds" in the United Kingdom.
Website Note
We have recently updated the PlanetQuest website and are planning further and continuing updates!
Important Note About PlanetQuest Funding Sources
Last, but certainly not least, we have decided that the best way to fund PlanetQuest, at least to start off, is for PlanetQuest membership to be a nominal $2 per month ($24/year) to allow us to have the number of stars track the number of users. We have devised a way to allow incremental acquisition of telescope time so that as PlanetQuest users are added, their contribution of $2 per month will allow us to provide a continuous stream of data, in addition to adding continuing utility to the Collaboratory. We will start with a stellar photometric-type classifier and a transit detection algorithm (both for single and double stars) but hope to add a gravitational lens planet detection algorithm, an eclipsing binary minimum timing planet detection algorithm, and a new method for doing SETI based on information theory, as well.
Annual dues of $24 for membership in the PlanetQuest Academy will allow many more people to participate in planet searching, while also allowing us to bring you more features in the Collaboratory. Eventually we may be able to offer PlanetQuest for free based on, for example, a Web advertising business model. But for a start, PlanetQuest Academy membership dues will help us bring you the best possible opportunities for discovery of new worlds!
With best regards,
Laurance R. Doyle, President
Brad Silen, Executive Director
J. Ellen Blue, Director of Publications
PlanetQuest
ps) We shall be sending out another newsletter shortly with details on PlanetQuest membership and donor information. We'll also mention details on the "live" release of PlanetQuest this fall. Much thanks again for your support!
April 2006
"We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened."
- Mark Twain in Huckleberry Finn
Dear Friends of PlanetQuest:
Hello to all of you once again, with our apologies for such a long silence! Much happened during the last part of 2005 and start of 2006, as you will read about below. There were changes in our organizational structure and personnel, two successful observing runs in the northern and southern hemispheres, and significant progress in the development of the Collaboratory software. Our special thanks to you all for your continued support!
PQ Personnel News
New Executive Director
Dr. David Gutelius has left PlanetQuest as Executive Director to pursue his many projects, including teaching at Stanford University and working on economics in the Arab world. We have greatly appreciated his expertise in getting the PlanetQuest project off the ground and set up for business. All the best Dave!
Our new Executive Director is Brad Silen, owner of Quality Process, a computer software development company, which is now working closely with PlanetQuest to produce the codes for analysis of stellar photometric types, BOINC updates needed to distribute the planet finding to you, and interface with our new star catalogue. Brad has degrees in Engineering and Philosophy! Welcome Brad!
Thanks to Outgoing Personnel
We thank Dr. Jay Doane, one of our programmers, who moves on to other projects after working on the first stages of the single-star transit detection algorithm (TDA) for PlanetQuest. We wish him all the very best in his new pursuits!
We thank Sylvia Paull, our first fundraiser; we have appreciated working with Sylvia and meeting many of her contacts in the software development and science education fields. We appreciated her cheerful and upbeat approach toward obtaining funding for PlanetQuest.
Welcome to New Personnel
Welcome to Dr. Craig Linberg, our new physicist. His PhD is in signal detection and estimation. He has been working with both the eclipsing binary transit modeler, as well as the planet detection algorithms. He brings a special knowledge of subnoise detection methods that will allow us (actually you!) to push the limits of planet detection down to smaller and smaller sizes as we obtain more data. Welcome Craig!
Astronomical Observing - Siding Spring and Lick Observatories
We have completed a one-month run at Siding Spring Observatory in Australia, gathering data from stars in the galactic center (the region known as "Baade's Window"), which has the densest number of stars in the sky, with the exception of globular clusters (stars in globular clusters appear to be too poor in heavy elements to have any planets form around them, judging from surveys of both 47 Tuc and omega Centauri). We have chosen Baade's Window as it is the densest region in the night sky (in both hemispheres) and has been the target of the OGLE (optical gravitational lensing experiment) project, which indicates that there are at least 170 million stars that can be observed there down to 18th magnitude. We used the 1.0-meter telescope at Siding Spring, which has a wide field imager covering a 52 x 52 arc-minute field of view (i.e., almost a square degree!)
We have also completed our observing run with our newly designed and built focal-reducing lens and prime-focus imaging system (which widened our field of view to 40 x 40 arc-minutes) on the Crossley telescope at Lick Observatory. Our special thanks to Drs. Robert Slawson (PlanetQuest astronomer) and Zoran Ninkov (PlanetQuest board member) for the design and quality control. The new system was mounted at the prime focus of the Crossley telescope and performed perfectly over our one-month observing run, allowing us to obtain excellent photometric precision down to about magnitude 19. We observed low-galactic-latitude regions to maximize the number of stars available for PlanetQuesting, some centered in open clusters like NGC 559, since planets discovered in star clusters can also be dated. (We shall outline how this is done on our website shortly - the basic idea is that the color of stars in a cluster can give a rather good idea of its age.) The field here was in the constellation
Cassiopeia. The Crossley telescope was the world's first modern (metal-on-glass) professional-sized (0.9-meter) reflecting telescope, built in the 1870s and given to Lick Observatory in 1895, and still works very well with our state-of-the-art optical-mechanical-imaging system. We used a back-lit UV-sensitive 16 million pixel square array along with the Stromvil stellar classification system filters (a mix of the Stromgren and Vilnius photometric systems) so that we may preclassify, photometrically, the stars you are going to look for planets around.
Collaboratory
We have found that the analysis of eclipsing binary star systems (double stars that orbit close to each other oriented in such a way as to eclipse each other across our line of sight) for planetary transits will take a significant amount of computational time but that these should be prime targets for planet detection as one will get at least two transit events every orbit of the planet. We now have eclipsing binary stellar classification software running and ready to be integrated into the TDA (transit detection algorithm) and converted to the BOINC format for distribution to you by, hopefully, early this fall. The detection of eclipsing binary transits was pioneered by three PlanetQuest scientists - Dr. Hans Deeg (of the Canary Islands Astrophysical Institute), Dr. Jon Jenkins (of the SETI Institute) and Dr. Laurance Doyle (of PlanetQuest).
We expect to be able to have a beta test ready soon. Stay tuned for this development! Our goal is a release you can try out by early this fall, when we can also expect to have enough data to accommodate 10,000 or more users.
Education
We have made an informal agreement with the NASA PlanetQuest project (the name of a new spacecraft mission formerly known as SIM - Space Interferometry Mission) to promote each other's websites (ours to be referred to as the "PlanetQuest Collaboratory" and theirs to be known as "SIM PlanetQuest"). We look forward to mutually promoting and assisting each other in bringing exciting educational experiences to you!
We shall continue to add to our "Astronomy in All Cultures" essays on the website with the goal of having a global interactive tool for learning more about the astronomy of indigenous peoples around the world. We have a multitude of interesting ideas and sources of graphical educational material we will be bringing to you soon, including (we expect) illustrations from a National Geographic television program on habitable planets in which Dr. Doyle was interviewed as a guest scientist and also helped to write the script. The show was called "Extraterrestrial" in the United States and "Alien Worlds" in the United Kingdom.
Website Note
We have recently updated the PlanetQuest website and are planning further and continuing updates!
Important Note About PlanetQuest Funding Sources
Last, but certainly not least, we have decided that the best way to fund PlanetQuest, at least to start off, is for PlanetQuest membership to be a nominal $2 per month ($24/year) to allow us to have the number of stars track the number of users. We have devised a way to allow incremental acquisition of telescope time so that as PlanetQuest users are added, their contribution of $2 per month will allow us to provide a continuous stream of data, in addition to adding continuing utility to the Collaboratory. We will start with a stellar photometric-type classifier and a transit detection algorithm (both for single and double stars) but hope to add a gravitational lens planet detection algorithm, an eclipsing binary minimum timing planet detection algorithm, and a new method for doing SETI based on information theory, as well.
Annual dues of $24 for membership in the PlanetQuest Academy will allow many more people to participate in planet searching, while also allowing us to bring you more features in the Collaboratory. Eventually we may be able to offer PlanetQuest for free based on, for example, a Web advertising business model. But for a start, PlanetQuest Academy membership dues will help us bring you the best possible opportunities for discovery of new worlds!
With best regards,
Laurance R. Doyle, President
Brad Silen, Executive Director
J. Ellen Blue, Director of Publications
PlanetQuest
ps) We shall be sending out another newsletter shortly with details on PlanetQuest membership and donor information. We'll also mention details on the "live" release of PlanetQuest this fall. Much thanks again for your support!
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