Bob Zimmerman describes the what happend last month in the solar cycle’s ups and downs: Is the Sun’s strange double-peaked solar maximum finally ending? – Behind The Black
Find lots more real and near real time imagery and data from space on the HobbySpace Sun & Space Weather page.
A scan of news and blog posts at Zooniverse citizen science projects:
The Sunspotter project was introduced quietly earlier in the year and the first round of classifications has been declared a success and a new one is underway:
The goal
is to determine the complexity of sunspot groups. It is well known (to solar physicists) that more complicated looking sunspot groups produce more solar flares than simple looking ones. But so far, scientists have not found a good way to quantify sunspot group complexity. This is not a task easily accomplished by a computer. Humans, on the other hand, can easily point to the more complex in a pair of objects, ideas, images, and so on.
The task is to judge relative complexity of sunspot groups:
The Sunspotter blog has a several interesting posts about the sun, sun spots, solar weather and more
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The Radio Galaxy Zoo project has turned up a pair of galaxies that seem to be connected despite measured at vastly different distances and velocities: Remarkable Discoveries Underway – Citizen Scientists fire up Radio Galaxy Zoo – Galaxy Zoo.
![arg00025v9_lab[1]](https://i0.wp.com/hobbyspace.com/Blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/arg00025v9_lab1-293x300.png?resize=293%2C300)
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Participants in the Planet Hunters project will look for exoplanets in data from the new K2 phase of the Kepler space observatory: Welcome to the Era of K2- Planet Hunters
“This is a photograph of the Milky Way with the approximate locations
of the 9 proposed Kepler K2 campaign target fields. The line shows
the ecliptic (Earth’s orbit plane) along which the Kepler Space
Telescope can maintain precision pointing. That line intersects the
galactic plane in two locations.
Credit: ESO/S. Brunier/NASA Kepler Mission.”
Click for higher resolution version.
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The Milky Way Project finds “a wonderful synergy that can exist between citizen scientists, professional scientists, and machine learning” : New MWP paper outlines the powerful synergy between citizens scientists, professional scientists, and machine learning – The Milky Way Project
A new Milky Way Project paper was published to the arXiv last week. The paper presents Brut, an algorithm trained to identify bubbles in infrared images of the Galaxy.
Brut uses the catalogue of bubbles identified by more 35,000 citizen scientists from the original Milky Way Project. These bubbles are used as a training set to allow Brut to discover the characteristics of bubbles in images from the Spitzer Space Telescope. This training data gives Brut the ability to identify bubbles just as well as expert astronomers!
The paper then shows how Brut can be used to re-assess the bubbles in the Milky Way Project catalog itself, and it finds that more than 10% of the objects in this catalog are really non-bubble interlopers. Furthermore, Brut is able to discover bubbles missed by previous searches too, usually ones that were hard to see because they are near bright sources.
[…]
At first it might seem that Brut removes the need for the Milky Way Project – but the ruth is exactly the opposite. This new paper demonstrates a wonderful synergy that can exist between citizen scientists, professional scientists, and machine learning. The example outlined with the Milky Way Project is that citizens can identify patterns that machines cannot detect without training, machine learning algorithms can use citizen science projects as input training sets, creating amazing new opportunities to speed-up the pace of discovery. A hybrid model of machine learning combined with crowdsourced training data from citizen scientists can not only classify large quantities of data, but also address the weakness of each approach if deployed alone.
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A lot more data arrives for participants in the Disk Detective project to look for stars with disks of matter around them where planets could be forming: Good News Everyone! 272,000 More Subjects – Disk Detective.
When the International Space Station’s orbit follows above the line between day and night on earth, the sun will never go completely below the horizon. ISS astronaut Reid Wiseman created a 6 second looping video he made from images over such a 92 minute orbit. The clip is on the Vine site, which hosts short looping videos :
Update: Reisman later posted this – Twitter / astro_reid:
Our orbit is almost parallel to the terminator so it is daylight with a low sun angle 24 hrs a day now on the #ISS. pic.twitter.com/Vd7bGm4Rnu
The ISEE-3 Reboot Project (see the recent post ISEE-3 Reboot Project takes command of the spacecraft) continues to make progress in the effort to resurrect and re-target NASA’s International Sun-Earth Explorer (ISEE-3) spacecraft, launched in 1978 to study the earth’s magnetosphere but re-targeted to study two comets. the Reboot Project will try to return the spacecraft to its original job.
What a success in the control center looks like – Arecibo Uncut: First Successful ISEE-3 Commanding –
A great look at a huge burst of energy and mass from the sun’s corona courtesy of NASA’s Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph (IRIS) :
A First for NASA’s IRIS: Observing a Gigantic
Eruption of Solar Material
A coronal mass ejection, or CME, surged off the side of the sun on May 9, 2014, and NASA’s newest solar observatory caught it in extraordinary detail. This was the first CME observed by the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph, or IRIS, which launched in June 2013 to peer into the lowest levels of the sun’s atmosphere with better resolution than ever before. Watch the movie to see how a curtain of solar material erupts outward at speeds of 1.5 million miles per hour.
IRIS must commit to pointing at certain areas of the sun at least a day in advance, so catching a CME in the act involves some educated guesses and a little bit of luck.
“We focus in on active regions to try to see a flare or a CME,” said Bart De Pontieu, the IRIS science lead at Lockheed Martin Solar & Astrophysics Laboratory in Palo Alto, California. “And then we wait and hope that we’ll catch something. This is the first clear CME for IRIS so the team is very excited.”
The IRIS imagery focuses in on material of 30,000 kelvins at the base, or foot points, of the CME. The line moving across the middle of the movie is the entrance slit for IRIS’s spectrograph, an instrument that can split light into its many wavelengths – a technique that ultimately allows scientists to measure temperature, velocity and density of the solar material behind the slit.
The field of view for this imagery is about five Earths wide and about seven-and-a-half Earths tall.
Lockheed Martin Solar & Astrophysics Laboratory designed the IRIS Observatory and manages the mission. NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California, provides mission operations and ground data systems. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the Explorers Program for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate in Washington, D.C.