PlanetQuest Newsletter Vol1 No 3
- Ersteller Sir Ulli
- Erstellt am
Sir Ulli
Grand Admiral Special
Friends of PlanetQuest Newsletter Vol 1, No 3
**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,
We have had a most amazing and fruitful month, as you probably know if
you’ve been keeping an eye on our website. Support, new collaborations
and proposed collaborations, a new member of the Board of Directors,
additional telescope time, offers from you, our Friends of PQ, to
contribute to our website…it’s a long list, very heartening, and keeping
us quite busy!
And speaking of our website, we are always interested in your thoughts,
ideas, suggestions, and feedback. Feel free to send comments or ideas to
us at info@planetquest.org.
===================================
**News**
Well, we have made news again! In April, at a meeting with Chabot Space
and Science Center to tell them about PlanetQuest and to discuss
possible educational collaborations, we met British software
entrepreneur Dill Faulkes, who, having a passion for public education in
the sciences, was quite interested to hear of our venture. After
meeting with our Board of Directors member Jeremy Crandell, President
Laurance Doyle, and Executive Director Dave Gutelius, Dr. Faulkes was so
enthusiastic about our mission that he gave us two-thirds time access to
two identical, world-class 2-meter telescopes—one on the island of Maui,
Hawaii and the other at Siding Spring, Australia. He built these
telescopes, at a cost of $20 million, for a math and science education
venture he created and funded in Great Britain in the late 1990s called
the Faulkes Telescope Project. Both telescopes can be operated
robotically and controlled over the Internet using a normal PC.
Needless to say, we are thrilled at what this can do for our ability to
bring millions of stars to PlanetQuesters searching for planets. The
Faulkes Telescopes will enable us to observe millions more stars now, to
be able to observe much fainter (and therefore more of the smaller and
sun-like) stars, and to be able to detect smaller planets (approaching
terrestrial-type). See the complete story at
http://planetquest.org/news/releases/index.htm. You’ll find photos of
the telescopes at http://www.faulkes-telescope.com/ as well as on our
site. Dr. Faulkes has also joined our Board of Directors.
**Educational Collaborations**
PlanetQuest is attracting a lot of attention from educational quarters.
As mentioned above, Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland,
California, invited us to come and give a presentation about who we are
and what we hope to accomplish. As education is a major interest of
PlanetQuest—not just for people in colleges or universities, but for
all—as well as for Chabot, a collaboration between us is natural and
exciting. We are also in discussions with two other well-known
organizations regarding possible fits between our activities and goals,
and hope to soon have more news regarding these possibilities.
**The Collaboratory Project**
We continue to make good progress towards our beta-version
Collaboratory, with important breakthroughs in optimizing the Transit
Detection Algorithm (TDA) for compatibility with the open-source BOINC
distributed computing platform. The stellar modeler is being built now
and being run against data to test for accuracy and speed. It’s
certainly exciting to see the various bits of the Collaboratory finally
coming together. Alpha testing is going well so far, and thank you to
all those who offered their computers (we’re keeping the alpha in-house
for now). Our next big steps include porting the Collaboratory to all
of those wonderfully diverse computing platforms, and helping the BOINC
project with some important issues.
PlanetQuest Cofounder and Executive Director David Gutelius is also
working with the PQ team on enhanced feature sets for the software.
While we can’t tell you much about them quite yet, they’ll make you feel
like you’re a part of the universe and allow you to meet other folks in
some really innovative ways. More leaked soon!
**Astronomy and Observing**
Literally moments after we sent out our last newsletter, we received
word from Siding Spring Observatory in Australia that our proposal for a
study to evaluate a way to detect planets around binary stars by
eclipse-minima timing had been accepted. We have time on the 1-meter
there from approximately mid-June to mid-July. This is an exciting
proposal, as, if the method proves successful, it will be a new way to
detect planets around other stars.
And, of course, we will begin to use the two robotic Faulkes Telescopes
very soon. We will be able to operate these ‘scopes while at the same
time observing from the Crossley at Lick Observatory as well as while
observing from the 1-meter at Siding Spring. Two 2-meter telescopes will
provide us with an incredible increase in the number of stars we’ll be
able to observe.
We have entered the final design phase for the new
field-corrector/reducer and prime-focus spider mount for the Crossley
0.9-meter telescope at Lick Observatory where we have been given four
months of observing time, to acquire data on stars for your transit
studies in the galactic plane (we are starting in the constellation
Cygnus this year—the same region that the NASA Kepler spacecraft will be
pointing at after its launch in June 2008).
**Website**
Some of you have offered, and some have already completed, translated
portions of our website into other languages, and we are truly excited
about this! Our dream from the beginning has been to offer all of our
information in as many of the world’s languages as possible. Those of
you who have offered to help with this will be hearing from us very soon.
We have updated and increased the amount of information and photos on
the telescope pages on our website. For a good look at the telescopes
we’ll be using, see http://www.planetquest.org/about/facilities/,
especially the Northern and Southern Hemisphere pages.
As you’ll see, we have some of our “Learn” pages up
(http://www.planetquest.org/learn/), and will continue to add more as we
are able. These are not as we will present our education pages in the
long run, but the quality of the information and the photos was worth
putting up while we proceed with our project.
**Television**
Look for PlanetQuest President Laurance Doyle on an upcoming National
Geographic special called Extraterrestrial. While the show does traverse
into science fiction, it gets there from a sound basis through
discussions with scientists and astronomers about what the possibilities
are for life around another star. The program will air in two parts
during mid-May. The first fifteen minutes of each show are the most
science-packed, with discussions of circumstellar habitable zones around
the smallest stars, stellar flares, and a bit about modeling of tidally
locked extrasolar planets’ atmospheres. Then it’s on to interestingly
weird alien creatures struggling for dominance in a harsh environment.
**Our Fundraising Efforts**
Do you want to help build an organization that changes lives and
inspires people on a global basis? If you are someone or know of someone
who would relish the opportunity to make a difference and bring positive
change to our world, please consider a contribution to PlanetQuest
(we’ve made this easy right on our website at
http://www.planetquest.org/support/), or tell someone else about us.
Even small donations can make a big difference, so please spread the
word and consider making a secure subscription donation each month. 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**
“People like you and I, ...do not grow old
no matter how long we live. What I mean is
that we never cease to stand like curious
children before the great Mystery into which
we were born.”
Albert Einstein to Otto Juliusburger (1942)
===================================
Best Wishes,
J. Ellen Blue
Publications Director
Laurance Doyle, PhD
President and Cofounder
David Gutelius, PhD
Executive Director and Cofounder
more Info
http://planetquest.org/
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,
We have had a most amazing and fruitful month, as you probably know if
you’ve been keeping an eye on our website. Support, new collaborations
and proposed collaborations, a new member of the Board of Directors,
additional telescope time, offers from you, our Friends of PQ, to
contribute to our website…it’s a long list, very heartening, and keeping
us quite busy!
And speaking of our website, we are always interested in your thoughts,
ideas, suggestions, and feedback. Feel free to send comments or ideas to
us at info@planetquest.org.
===================================
**News**
Well, we have made news again! In April, at a meeting with Chabot Space
and Science Center to tell them about PlanetQuest and to discuss
possible educational collaborations, we met British software
entrepreneur Dill Faulkes, who, having a passion for public education in
the sciences, was quite interested to hear of our venture. After
meeting with our Board of Directors member Jeremy Crandell, President
Laurance Doyle, and Executive Director Dave Gutelius, Dr. Faulkes was so
enthusiastic about our mission that he gave us two-thirds time access to
two identical, world-class 2-meter telescopes—one on the island of Maui,
Hawaii and the other at Siding Spring, Australia. He built these
telescopes, at a cost of $20 million, for a math and science education
venture he created and funded in Great Britain in the late 1990s called
the Faulkes Telescope Project. Both telescopes can be operated
robotically and controlled over the Internet using a normal PC.
Needless to say, we are thrilled at what this can do for our ability to
bring millions of stars to PlanetQuesters searching for planets. The
Faulkes Telescopes will enable us to observe millions more stars now, to
be able to observe much fainter (and therefore more of the smaller and
sun-like) stars, and to be able to detect smaller planets (approaching
terrestrial-type). See the complete story at
http://planetquest.org/news/releases/index.htm. You’ll find photos of
the telescopes at http://www.faulkes-telescope.com/ as well as on our
site. Dr. Faulkes has also joined our Board of Directors.
**Educational Collaborations**
PlanetQuest is attracting a lot of attention from educational quarters.
As mentioned above, Chabot Space and Science Center in Oakland,
California, invited us to come and give a presentation about who we are
and what we hope to accomplish. As education is a major interest of
PlanetQuest—not just for people in colleges or universities, but for
all—as well as for Chabot, a collaboration between us is natural and
exciting. We are also in discussions with two other well-known
organizations regarding possible fits between our activities and goals,
and hope to soon have more news regarding these possibilities.
**The Collaboratory Project**
We continue to make good progress towards our beta-version
Collaboratory, with important breakthroughs in optimizing the Transit
Detection Algorithm (TDA) for compatibility with the open-source BOINC
distributed computing platform. The stellar modeler is being built now
and being run against data to test for accuracy and speed. It’s
certainly exciting to see the various bits of the Collaboratory finally
coming together. Alpha testing is going well so far, and thank you to
all those who offered their computers (we’re keeping the alpha in-house
for now). Our next big steps include porting the Collaboratory to all
of those wonderfully diverse computing platforms, and helping the BOINC
project with some important issues.
PlanetQuest Cofounder and Executive Director David Gutelius is also
working with the PQ team on enhanced feature sets for the software.
While we can’t tell you much about them quite yet, they’ll make you feel
like you’re a part of the universe and allow you to meet other folks in
some really innovative ways. More leaked soon!
**Astronomy and Observing**
Literally moments after we sent out our last newsletter, we received
word from Siding Spring Observatory in Australia that our proposal for a
study to evaluate a way to detect planets around binary stars by
eclipse-minima timing had been accepted. We have time on the 1-meter
there from approximately mid-June to mid-July. This is an exciting
proposal, as, if the method proves successful, it will be a new way to
detect planets around other stars.
And, of course, we will begin to use the two robotic Faulkes Telescopes
very soon. We will be able to operate these ‘scopes while at the same
time observing from the Crossley at Lick Observatory as well as while
observing from the 1-meter at Siding Spring. Two 2-meter telescopes will
provide us with an incredible increase in the number of stars we’ll be
able to observe.
We have entered the final design phase for the new
field-corrector/reducer and prime-focus spider mount for the Crossley
0.9-meter telescope at Lick Observatory where we have been given four
months of observing time, to acquire data on stars for your transit
studies in the galactic plane (we are starting in the constellation
Cygnus this year—the same region that the NASA Kepler spacecraft will be
pointing at after its launch in June 2008).
**Website**
Some of you have offered, and some have already completed, translated
portions of our website into other languages, and we are truly excited
about this! Our dream from the beginning has been to offer all of our
information in as many of the world’s languages as possible. Those of
you who have offered to help with this will be hearing from us very soon.
We have updated and increased the amount of information and photos on
the telescope pages on our website. For a good look at the telescopes
we’ll be using, see http://www.planetquest.org/about/facilities/,
especially the Northern and Southern Hemisphere pages.
As you’ll see, we have some of our “Learn” pages up
(http://www.planetquest.org/learn/), and will continue to add more as we
are able. These are not as we will present our education pages in the
long run, but the quality of the information and the photos was worth
putting up while we proceed with our project.
**Television**
Look for PlanetQuest President Laurance Doyle on an upcoming National
Geographic special called Extraterrestrial. While the show does traverse
into science fiction, it gets there from a sound basis through
discussions with scientists and astronomers about what the possibilities
are for life around another star. The program will air in two parts
during mid-May. The first fifteen minutes of each show are the most
science-packed, with discussions of circumstellar habitable zones around
the smallest stars, stellar flares, and a bit about modeling of tidally
locked extrasolar planets’ atmospheres. Then it’s on to interestingly
weird alien creatures struggling for dominance in a harsh environment.
**Our Fundraising Efforts**
Do you want to help build an organization that changes lives and
inspires people on a global basis? If you are someone or know of someone
who would relish the opportunity to make a difference and bring positive
change to our world, please consider a contribution to PlanetQuest
(we’ve made this easy right on our website at
http://www.planetquest.org/support/), or tell someone else about us.
Even small donations can make a big difference, so please spread the
word and consider making a secure subscription donation each month. 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**
“People like you and I, ...do not grow old
no matter how long we live. What I mean is
that we never cease to stand like curious
children before the great Mystery into which
we were born.”
Albert Einstein to Otto Juliusburger (1942)
===================================
Best Wishes,
J. Ellen Blue
Publications Director
Laurance Doyle, PhD
President and Cofounder
David Gutelius, PhD
Executive Director and Cofounder
more Info
http://planetquest.org/
mfg
Sir Ulli
Sir Ulli
Grand Admiral Special
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]th 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
also mit geld...
da bin ich dann raus...
mfg
Sir uLLI
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]th 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
also mit geld...
da bin ich dann raus...
mfg
Sir uLLI
Sir Ulli
Grand Admiral Special
PlanetQuest Collaboratory Newsletter
November 2006, Vol. 2, No. 2
"The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do."
- Galileo Galilei
Greetings Friends of PlanetQuest!
Much thanks to you all for your support, as we have been "under the radar" for some time now, mainly collecting data on stars for the PlanetQuest searches you will be doing! We have completed this year's observing at the UC Lick Observatory in California and now have over 25 million observations of tens of thousands of stars. Our observing costs run $88 a night, so if you would like to make a contribution specifically to support our observing season next year, this can be done on our website, www.planetquest.org. Thank you for your support over these past months and your continuing support! It is much appreciated!
We have also appreciated the PlanetQuest discussion groups, with topics ranging from life on Mars and detection-of-extrasolar-planet techniques, to the nature of black holes and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
The most-asked question is, not surprisingly, "When can we go online and begin PlanetQuesting?" We are aiming for the early part of next year for the alpha test, followed later in the year by the full beta release. But the speed at which we can bring you the software also depends on our funding since our algorithms have to be programmed into the complex software necessary to bring our observational data analysis to you.
We will soon be posting two new activities on the website. The first is a planetary transit simulator where you can try out your own transit variations-looking for Jupiter-, Saturn-, Neptune-, or Earth-sized planets, crossing different parts of the solar-type stellar disc (varying planetary orbital inclination), and so on. The other feature is a flash demo of the simplest alpha-test Collaboratory design so that you can begin to become familiar with some of the features you may expect to see in your planet searches.
We shall be adding several more detection methods to the Collaboratory during the first year (as well as an information-theory-based SETI search capability that will complement existing SETI searches) after the details and testing of the transit detection algorithm have been fully performed.
The newest article on PlanetQuest has recently been posted on the Space.com website (space.com), as well as on the SETI Institute website. Check it out!
Astronomical Observing-Preparing the New PlanetQuest Star Catalog
>From our observing run this season at Lick Observatory using the Crossley 0.9-meter telescope to observe stars near the galactic plane in the constellation Cassiopeia, we have hundreds of thousands of stellar light curves. In testing our system, we have made a number of discoveries. For example, while characterizing stellar classification schemes, we discovered a dozen new eclipsing binary systems! These appear to be made up of late-type stars (i.e., solar or smaller) that were not in any known star catalog (including the extensive US Naval Observatory Double Star Catalog). So we know our system is working. Many such discoveries await you soon too!
We have also begun data reduction of observations done at Siding Spring Observatory in Coonabarabran, Australia where we observed the most crowded star region in the sky-the Southern Hemisphere region toward the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which is known as "Baade's Window" because it is a region where gas and dust have cleared enough to allow the observation of over 100 million stars. From this data we already know that there are new eclipsing binaries (used to determine stellar radii and many other things), RR Lyrae stars (used as stellar distance indicators), and many standard stars with stable circumstellar habitable zones where terrestrial planets could orbit at the right distance for liquid water to exist on their surfaces.
With the completion of the Collaboratory and these data sets, we hope to be able to accommodate as many as 100,000 PlanetQuest users by next year.
We have also started a collaboration with Perth Observatory (http://www.perthobservatory.wa.gov.au) in Western Australia, where we hope to install one or more PlanetQuest telescopes to increase the coverage in the Southern Hemisphere. Western Australia provides a unique longitude location so that more continuous observing can eventually be performed.
Collaboratory-the Alpha Version, Flash Demo, and Future Directions
A flash demo sample of the alpha Collaboratory look will be posted on the website where you can see how the stellar field of view, star selection, light curve plotting, stellar classification, and planetary transit search algorithms will appear on your desktop.
This year we shall start out with the capability of analyzing single and double star transits. But we hope, over the next year, to add the capability to detect extrasolar planets by eclipsing binary minima timing, gravitational lensing, and a new information theory approach to SETI-what might be called SETC (Search for Extraterrestrial Communications)-that is completely complementary to existing SETI projects. Current radio SETI projects detect the carrier signal (i.e., asking the question: Are there radio transmitters elsewhere in the galaxy?) while we will be looking at the modulated message itself (i.e., asking the question: Are the complexity and structure of the modulated radio waves, taken together, compatible with its being a message, that is, a communication system?). You will be the first to use this exciting new criterion for doing another type of SETI project on your computer.
We will soon also be posting articles originally written for space.com explaining in detail how various extrasolar planet detection techniques work, as well as details on what makes a circumstellar habitable zone and other articles that you can read to better enjoy and understand the importance of your discoveries. We have been applying information theory to animal communications, especially dolphins and humpback whales in collaboration with colleagues at the University of California at Davis http://faculty.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/faculty/bjmccowan/lab/McCowan_Lab.htm, and we'll be posting information on this detection method's extension to SETI projects soon on our website. As part of this effort, another new organization collaborating with PlanetQuest will be the Alaska Whale Foundation (http://www.sfu.ca/biology/berg/whale/abcwhale.html), which specializes in the study of humpback whales in southeast Alaska. Please stay tuned for more details on this aspect of our diverse
Collaboratory efforts.
Education
Another new collaboration recently agreed upon is to share educational components with the London, England�based Ecospheres Project headed by Dr. Martin Heath of Greenwich Community College. Dr. Heath's specialty is the study of the habitability of forest ecosystems (photosynthetic-based environments) in terrestrial history and their application to the habitabe zones around other stars. The Ecospheres Project will be providing updated-and in many cases originally researched-material for our educational component on this most interesting connection between stellar evolution, planetary geological processes, and photosynthetic plant adaptation that could take place on extrasolar planets.
On our planet, besides radio signals, the most obvious signal of biological life is the ozone (a triple oxygen molecule) absorption feature at a spectral wavelength of 9.6 microns. As far as we know, only photosynthetic plants can produce this feature. And since such oxygen-producing "forests" existed hundreds of millions of years before man-made radio signals, it is worthwhile to study ways of detecting such forests around other stars, in preparation for near-future planned space missions (such as NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder [http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/TPF/tpf_index.cfm], and the European Space Agency's Darwin mission [http://www.esa.int/esaSC/120382_index_0_m.html]). We will be specializing, then, in "galactic forest ecological" aspects of planetary habitability in our educational materials in collaboration with the Ecospheres Project.
Fundraising and Joining the PlanetQuest Academy
Our primary goal in announcing the idea of membership dues in the PlanetQuest Academy was to ensure that the number of stars "tracks," or matches, the number of PlanetQuesters' data needs. The one thing we do not want to do is run out of stellar data for you. However, we also want as many people doing PlanetQuest searches as possible, and want this access to be free to all! So, we have decided that the downloads will all be free, but paid membership in the PlanetQuest Academy, while voluntary, will guarantee that you will always have data to analyze. This will run about $25 per year and include other benefits. If we begin to run low on stellar data (i.e., light curves to be searched for planets) then nonmembers may have to wait a bit until we can obtain more observations, but members will be guaranteed data for their Collaboratories. However, as we get more telescopes on line, having enough data will become less and less of a concern.
Our News Page
We will soon create a news page on our website where we will keep you up to date on interesting developments resulting from our observational analysis and other work, our progress toward the alpha and beta tests, and new collaborations, such as the ones with Perth Observatory, the Alaska Whale Foundation, and the Ecospheres Project, as well as other newsworthy items.
This project relies on the support of grants and other funding sources from both the public and private sectors. Without your help, we would find it difficult to proceed. And so, thank you all very much for your continued support! We greatly appreciate your enthusiasm and sense of adventure. And we hope to have you all online soon, making discoveries of your own!
With best regards,
Laurance R. Doyle, President
Brad Silen, Executive Director
J. Ellen Blue, Publications Director
PlanetQuest
www.planetquest.org
November 2006, Vol. 2, No. 2
"The sun, with all those planets revolving around it and dependent on it, can still ripen a bunch of grapes as if it had nothing else in the universe to do."
- Galileo Galilei
Greetings Friends of PlanetQuest!
Much thanks to you all for your support, as we have been "under the radar" for some time now, mainly collecting data on stars for the PlanetQuest searches you will be doing! We have completed this year's observing at the UC Lick Observatory in California and now have over 25 million observations of tens of thousands of stars. Our observing costs run $88 a night, so if you would like to make a contribution specifically to support our observing season next year, this can be done on our website, www.planetquest.org. Thank you for your support over these past months and your continuing support! It is much appreciated!
We have also appreciated the PlanetQuest discussion groups, with topics ranging from life on Mars and detection-of-extrasolar-planet techniques, to the nature of black holes and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence.
The most-asked question is, not surprisingly, "When can we go online and begin PlanetQuesting?" We are aiming for the early part of next year for the alpha test, followed later in the year by the full beta release. But the speed at which we can bring you the software also depends on our funding since our algorithms have to be programmed into the complex software necessary to bring our observational data analysis to you.
We will soon be posting two new activities on the website. The first is a planetary transit simulator where you can try out your own transit variations-looking for Jupiter-, Saturn-, Neptune-, or Earth-sized planets, crossing different parts of the solar-type stellar disc (varying planetary orbital inclination), and so on. The other feature is a flash demo of the simplest alpha-test Collaboratory design so that you can begin to become familiar with some of the features you may expect to see in your planet searches.
We shall be adding several more detection methods to the Collaboratory during the first year (as well as an information-theory-based SETI search capability that will complement existing SETI searches) after the details and testing of the transit detection algorithm have been fully performed.
The newest article on PlanetQuest has recently been posted on the Space.com website (space.com), as well as on the SETI Institute website. Check it out!
Astronomical Observing-Preparing the New PlanetQuest Star Catalog
>From our observing run this season at Lick Observatory using the Crossley 0.9-meter telescope to observe stars near the galactic plane in the constellation Cassiopeia, we have hundreds of thousands of stellar light curves. In testing our system, we have made a number of discoveries. For example, while characterizing stellar classification schemes, we discovered a dozen new eclipsing binary systems! These appear to be made up of late-type stars (i.e., solar or smaller) that were not in any known star catalog (including the extensive US Naval Observatory Double Star Catalog). So we know our system is working. Many such discoveries await you soon too!
We have also begun data reduction of observations done at Siding Spring Observatory in Coonabarabran, Australia where we observed the most crowded star region in the sky-the Southern Hemisphere region toward the center of the Milky Way galaxy, which is known as "Baade's Window" because it is a region where gas and dust have cleared enough to allow the observation of over 100 million stars. From this data we already know that there are new eclipsing binaries (used to determine stellar radii and many other things), RR Lyrae stars (used as stellar distance indicators), and many standard stars with stable circumstellar habitable zones where terrestrial planets could orbit at the right distance for liquid water to exist on their surfaces.
With the completion of the Collaboratory and these data sets, we hope to be able to accommodate as many as 100,000 PlanetQuest users by next year.
We have also started a collaboration with Perth Observatory (http://www.perthobservatory.wa.gov.au) in Western Australia, where we hope to install one or more PlanetQuest telescopes to increase the coverage in the Southern Hemisphere. Western Australia provides a unique longitude location so that more continuous observing can eventually be performed.
Collaboratory-the Alpha Version, Flash Demo, and Future Directions
A flash demo sample of the alpha Collaboratory look will be posted on the website where you can see how the stellar field of view, star selection, light curve plotting, stellar classification, and planetary transit search algorithms will appear on your desktop.
This year we shall start out with the capability of analyzing single and double star transits. But we hope, over the next year, to add the capability to detect extrasolar planets by eclipsing binary minima timing, gravitational lensing, and a new information theory approach to SETI-what might be called SETC (Search for Extraterrestrial Communications)-that is completely complementary to existing SETI projects. Current radio SETI projects detect the carrier signal (i.e., asking the question: Are there radio transmitters elsewhere in the galaxy?) while we will be looking at the modulated message itself (i.e., asking the question: Are the complexity and structure of the modulated radio waves, taken together, compatible with its being a message, that is, a communication system?). You will be the first to use this exciting new criterion for doing another type of SETI project on your computer.
We will soon also be posting articles originally written for space.com explaining in detail how various extrasolar planet detection techniques work, as well as details on what makes a circumstellar habitable zone and other articles that you can read to better enjoy and understand the importance of your discoveries. We have been applying information theory to animal communications, especially dolphins and humpback whales in collaboration with colleagues at the University of California at Davis http://faculty.vetmed.ucdavis.edu/faculty/bjmccowan/lab/McCowan_Lab.htm, and we'll be posting information on this detection method's extension to SETI projects soon on our website. As part of this effort, another new organization collaborating with PlanetQuest will be the Alaska Whale Foundation (http://www.sfu.ca/biology/berg/whale/abcwhale.html), which specializes in the study of humpback whales in southeast Alaska. Please stay tuned for more details on this aspect of our diverse
Collaboratory efforts.
Education
Another new collaboration recently agreed upon is to share educational components with the London, England�based Ecospheres Project headed by Dr. Martin Heath of Greenwich Community College. Dr. Heath's specialty is the study of the habitability of forest ecosystems (photosynthetic-based environments) in terrestrial history and their application to the habitabe zones around other stars. The Ecospheres Project will be providing updated-and in many cases originally researched-material for our educational component on this most interesting connection between stellar evolution, planetary geological processes, and photosynthetic plant adaptation that could take place on extrasolar planets.
On our planet, besides radio signals, the most obvious signal of biological life is the ozone (a triple oxygen molecule) absorption feature at a spectral wavelength of 9.6 microns. As far as we know, only photosynthetic plants can produce this feature. And since such oxygen-producing "forests" existed hundreds of millions of years before man-made radio signals, it is worthwhile to study ways of detecting such forests around other stars, in preparation for near-future planned space missions (such as NASA's Terrestrial Planet Finder [http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/TPF/tpf_index.cfm], and the European Space Agency's Darwin mission [http://www.esa.int/esaSC/120382_index_0_m.html]). We will be specializing, then, in "galactic forest ecological" aspects of planetary habitability in our educational materials in collaboration with the Ecospheres Project.
Fundraising and Joining the PlanetQuest Academy
Our primary goal in announcing the idea of membership dues in the PlanetQuest Academy was to ensure that the number of stars "tracks," or matches, the number of PlanetQuesters' data needs. The one thing we do not want to do is run out of stellar data for you. However, we also want as many people doing PlanetQuest searches as possible, and want this access to be free to all! So, we have decided that the downloads will all be free, but paid membership in the PlanetQuest Academy, while voluntary, will guarantee that you will always have data to analyze. This will run about $25 per year and include other benefits. If we begin to run low on stellar data (i.e., light curves to be searched for planets) then nonmembers may have to wait a bit until we can obtain more observations, but members will be guaranteed data for their Collaboratories. However, as we get more telescopes on line, having enough data will become less and less of a concern.
Our News Page
We will soon create a news page on our website where we will keep you up to date on interesting developments resulting from our observational analysis and other work, our progress toward the alpha and beta tests, and new collaborations, such as the ones with Perth Observatory, the Alaska Whale Foundation, and the Ecospheres Project, as well as other newsworthy items.
This project relies on the support of grants and other funding sources from both the public and private sectors. Without your help, we would find it difficult to proceed. And so, thank you all very much for your continued support! We greatly appreciate your enthusiasm and sense of adventure. And we hope to have you all online soon, making discoveries of your own!
With best regards,
Laurance R. Doyle, President
Brad Silen, Executive Director
J. Ellen Blue, Publications Director
PlanetQuest
www.planetquest.org
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