Friends of PlanetQuest Newsletter Vol 1, No 1
**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,
Welcome to our first Friends of PlanetQuest Newsletter. We'd first like to thank you for showing interest in what we're doing. It's taken the PlanetQuest team a long time to get this place, and we'll certainly appreciate your support as we build the most exciting science project on the planet.
Our aim is to send this short informal newsletter to you about once a month. The purpose is to let you know what we've accomplished, what we're working on, and how you can get involved.
Et une petite note à nos Amis francophones: Bienvenu, bienvenu à vous! Nos excuses que nous ne sommes pas capable de produire un bulletin d'informations bilingue chaque mois, mais soit assuré que nous pensons à vous! Plus, vos euros donnés valent de plus en plus ici, comment triste...
===================================
**News!**
$408m Kepler Mission Adopts Our TDA
Yup, it's true: NASA will be using a customized version of our Transit Detection Algorithm, optimized for space-borne observing, as its sole method of locating new planets. Dr. Jon Jenkins, who worked with PlanetQuest co-founder Dr. Laurance Doyle in the late 1990s to develop the original photometric transit detection algorithms and who continues as our own TDA expert, is the lead signal detection specialist and a coinvestigator on the Kepler mission. Jon is continuing to create the best ground-based algorithms available, and we're lucky to have him on our team.
PlanetQuest Public Web Launched
In December, we launched a basic public website to tell the world who we are and what we're doing. You probably know this already if you're reading this newsletter. We're constantly making improvements as we go, and we thought we'd let you know what's in store in the coming months:
o A Flash demo of the coming PlanetQuest Collaboratory - you'll get to see how the parts work together in an interactive mockup. This is a preview of next generation distributed computing at its best.
o Lots and lots of education content. This will be a major focus for us - posting interactive ways that you can learn about science, astrophysics, global histories of astronomy (yes, there's more than one), and math.
o More information on our telescopes, including news about the Crossley telescope upgrades, for example
World-Changing Science - Your Help Required
If you subscribe to this Newsletter, you probably have some idea of what PlanetQuest will accomplish. Think of it, though: in five years, we hope to have 20 million PlanetQuesters around the world, discovering literally hundreds of planets each year. Along the way, they'll learn not only a great deal about science and math, but also that each little PlanetQuester is a vital part of our own world community and connected to the larger universe. This is public science in every possible way; when you discover something out there - your name goes down in our PQ catalogs and in astronomical history. Every PlanetQuest participant is doing real science and contributing to our global effort to learn more about our universe. The resulting science, like the universe, belongs to everyone - not just professional scientists.
*But we your financial support to launch this global effort.* We just recently added an easy way to donate to PQ: just hit the "Donate!" link at the top of any page. Yes, for the price of two small hot chocolates per month, you can help us build PlanetQuest into the world-changing organization! We are a registered 501(c)(3) US nonprofit charitable organization, so your donations are completely tax-deductible.
===================================
**Quote of the month**
"Astronomy is useful, because it raises us above ourselves; it is useful, because it is grand, ... it shows us how small is man's body, how great his mind. His intelligence can embrace the whole of this dazzling immensity in which his body is only an obscure point and enjoy its silent harmony... Thus we can attain self-insight, something which cannot cost us too dear, since this insight makes us great."
- Henri Poincaré, 1903
===================================
Best Wishes,
David Gutelius, Ph.D.
Executive Director and Co-founder
Friends of PlanetQuest Newsletter Vol 1, No 2
**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,
First, we would like to say welcome to our many new subscribers! We are very encouraged by the great number of you who signed up for our newsletter during March. No doubt many of you first heard about us in the recent wired.com article-see http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,66757,00.html?tw=wn_tophead for the complete text. In the fast-paced world of the news media, information about scientific discoveries and projects, which are by their very nature, quite complex, can often be misstated; the wired.com article was overall a bright exception. We do wish to acknowledge the heroic efforts of all planet discoverers to date-it is not easy to find another world!
We are making progress daily, and as you will see by the reports below, PlanetQuest is continuously moving along multiple fronts. None of this could be happening without the superb and dedicated efforts of individuals who are specialists and experts in their fields.
Many thanks to Dr. David Carico, our Education Director, for his update on the education front!
===================================
**Our Education Project**
One of our most important goals here at PlanetQuest is that you, the "PlanetQuester," be able to learn more about astronomy while you search for new worlds. We are glad to report that our "educational front" is moving forward with steady progress. We have a detailed task list, an overall timeframe, and quite a good idea of what "learning astronomy with PlanetQuest" will be like.
When everything is up and running you will find numerous links throughout the Collaboratory and our website, each of which will give you a chance to learn. Some links will provide simple glossary definitions; others will open up brief illustrated essays; still others will lead to animations that let you participate and explore on your own.
Our first category of content will be "The History of Astronomy." From this link you will be able to learn about any of 24 initial topics, including Chaco Canyon, Chichén Itzá, Stonehenge, ancient Chinese astronomy, Polynesian star navigators, the oldest written astronomical record-and many more! Look for this first educational link soon!
**The Collaboratory Project**
Collaboratory software development is blazing ahead. We continue to make improvements to the core algorithms that will do all the processing work in the Collaboratory. Aside from additions to the core Transit Detection Algorithm (TDA), we're putting together the pieces for the first-ever automated Stellar Classification engine that will compare targets against known stellar types. This will not only help optimize TDA searches, it will also help you classify stars more completely and share that important data with the larger scientific community.
We're continuing to donate our time and code to the BOINC project (http://boinc.berkeley.edu/), which provides our distributed computing management layer. PlanetQuest team members are collaborating with BOINC programmers and the larger open source community to make BOINC the best, most robust distributed computing platform ever devised.
We're also putting the finishing touches on a Macromedia Flash-based preview Collaboratory demo that we hope to post to the site soon. Stay tuned!
**Astronomy and Observing**
We have arrived at that most exciting time of year-requests for time at observatories and the beginning of our observing season! The Milky Way is rising to be in the optimal position for our telescopes to gather the maximum amount of data on a huge number of stars. Soon we will begin observing at the Crossley telescope at Lick Observatory (http://mthamilton.ucolick.org/) on Mt. Hamilton, above the city of San Jose, California. Our observing season there will run from the beginning of June through September-long nights of taking images of stars in the most densely crowded region of Sagittarius. Our astronomers will be working a minimum of 12-hour days, beginning around 7 pm, and straight through the night until after dawn every night that is clear enough for observing. (You can see how our weather is by checking http://mthamilton.ucolick.org/hamcam .) Because we use the photometric transit (light measuring) method, weather conditions (clouds, fog) and the atmosphere over the observatory have a large impact on our ability to take good images (also called taking data). A historical note: the Crossley is a Victorian-era telescope using state-of-the-art equipment for a cutting-edge science/distributed-computing project! An incredible contrast and a tribute to the Crossley-quite a story in itself. Incidentally, the Crossley was the world's first modern reflector, and Lick Observatory the world's first professional mountain-top observatory.
We are manufacturing a new prime focus spider mount to accommodate a corrector that will increase the field of view of the Crossley to a much wider angle (40 by 40 arcminutes) in order to record hundreds of thousands of stars. We are collaborating with the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York and using a state-of-the-art Kodak back-lit, blue-sensitive CCD (charge couple device).
We are currently awaiting word on an observing proposal at a telescope in the Southern Hemisphere, also for observing time during June.
**Our Fundraising Efforts**
Fundraising efforts are also proceeding on multiple fronts, as we work to educate potential donors about exactly who we are, why this project is world-class, worthwhile, and important to the global community from both the educational and scientific standpoints. 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 (we've made this easy right on our website (http://www.planetquest.org/support/), and tell your friends and colleagues about us. For the price of two hot chocolates 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**
"Mortal though I be, yea ephemeral, if but a moment I gaze up at the night's starry domain of heaven, Then no longer on earth I stand; I touch the Creator, And my lively spirit drinketh immortality."
Claudius Ptolemy (140 AD, Astronomer)
===================================
Best Wishes,
Laurance Doyle, PhD
President and Cofounder
David Gutelius, PhD
Executive Director and Cofounder
"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!
RE: PlanetQuest BOINC project
)
me-[at]-rescam.org
Friends of PlanetQuest
)
Friends of PlanetQuest Newsletter Vol 1, No 1
**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,
Welcome to our first Friends of PlanetQuest Newsletter. We'd first like to thank you for showing interest in what we're doing. It's taken the PlanetQuest team a long time to get this place, and we'll certainly appreciate your support as we build the most exciting science project on the planet.
Our aim is to send this short informal newsletter to you about once a month. The purpose is to let you know what we've accomplished, what we're working on, and how you can get involved.
Et une petite note à nos Amis francophones: Bienvenu, bienvenu à vous! Nos excuses que nous ne sommes pas capable de produire un bulletin d'informations bilingue chaque mois, mais soit assuré que nous pensons à vous! Plus, vos euros donnés valent de plus en plus ici, comment triste...
===================================
**News!**
$408m Kepler Mission Adopts Our TDA
Yup, it's true: NASA will be using a customized version of our Transit Detection Algorithm, optimized for space-borne observing, as its sole method of locating new planets. Dr. Jon Jenkins, who worked with PlanetQuest co-founder Dr. Laurance Doyle in the late 1990s to develop the original photometric transit detection algorithms and who continues as our own TDA expert, is the lead signal detection specialist and a coinvestigator on the Kepler mission. Jon is continuing to create the best ground-based algorithms available, and we're lucky to have him on our team.
PlanetQuest Public Web Launched
In December, we launched a basic public website to tell the world who we are and what we're doing. You probably know this already if you're reading this newsletter. We're constantly making improvements as we go, and we thought we'd let you know what's in store in the coming months:
o A Flash demo of the coming PlanetQuest Collaboratory - you'll get to see how the parts work together in an interactive mockup. This is a preview of next generation distributed computing at its best.
o Lots and lots of education content. This will be a major focus for us - posting interactive ways that you can learn about science, astrophysics, global histories of astronomy (yes, there's more than one), and math.
o More information on our telescopes, including news about the Crossley telescope upgrades, for example
World-Changing Science - Your Help Required
If you subscribe to this Newsletter, you probably have some idea of what PlanetQuest will accomplish. Think of it, though: in five years, we hope to have 20 million PlanetQuesters around the world, discovering literally hundreds of planets each year. Along the way, they'll learn not only a great deal about science and math, but also that each little PlanetQuester is a vital part of our own world community and connected to the larger universe. This is public science in every possible way; when you discover something out there - your name goes down in our PQ catalogs and in astronomical history. Every PlanetQuest participant is doing real science and contributing to our global effort to learn more about our universe. The resulting science, like the universe, belongs to everyone - not just professional scientists.
*But we your financial support to launch this global effort.* We just recently added an easy way to donate to PQ: just hit the "Donate!" link at the top of any page. Yes, for the price of two small hot chocolates per month, you can help us build PlanetQuest into the world-changing organization! We are a registered 501(c)(3) US nonprofit charitable organization, so your donations are completely tax-deductible.
===================================
**Quote of the month**
"Astronomy is useful, because it raises us above ourselves; it is useful, because it is grand, ... it shows us how small is man's body, how great his mind. His intelligence can embrace the whole of this dazzling immensity in which his body is only an obscure point and enjoy its silent harmony... Thus we can attain self-insight, something which cannot cost us too dear, since this insight makes us great."
- Henri Poincaré, 1903
===================================
Best Wishes,
David Gutelius, Ph.D.
Executive Director and Co-founder
Laurance Doyle, Ph.D.
President and Co-founder
me-[at]-rescam.org
Friends of PlanetQuest
)
Friends of PlanetQuest Newsletter Vol 1, No 2
**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,
First, we would like to say welcome to our many new subscribers! We are very encouraged by the great number of you who signed up for our newsletter during March. No doubt many of you first heard about us in the recent wired.com article-see
http://www.wired.com/news/space/0,2697,66757,00.html?tw=wn_tophead for the complete text. In the fast-paced world of the news media, information about scientific discoveries and projects, which are by their very nature, quite complex, can often be misstated; the wired.com article was overall a bright exception. We do wish to acknowledge the heroic efforts of all planet discoverers to date-it is not easy to find another world!
We are making progress daily, and as you will see by the reports below, PlanetQuest is continuously moving along multiple fronts. None of this could be happening without the superb and dedicated efforts of individuals who are specialists and experts in their fields.
Many thanks to Dr. David Carico, our Education Director, for his update on the education front!
===================================
**Our Education Project**
One of our most important goals here at PlanetQuest is that you, the "PlanetQuester," be able to learn more about astronomy while you search for new worlds. We are glad to report that our "educational front" is moving forward with steady progress. We have a detailed task list, an overall timeframe, and quite a good idea of what "learning astronomy with PlanetQuest" will be like.
When everything is up and running you will find numerous links throughout the Collaboratory and our website, each of which will give you a chance to learn. Some links will provide simple glossary definitions; others will open up brief illustrated essays; still others will lead to animations that let you participate and explore on your own.
Our first category of content will be "The History of Astronomy." From this link you will be able to learn about any of 24 initial topics, including Chaco Canyon, Chichén Itzá, Stonehenge, ancient Chinese astronomy, Polynesian star navigators, the oldest written astronomical record-and many more! Look for this first educational link soon!
**The Collaboratory Project**
Collaboratory software development is blazing ahead. We continue to make improvements to the core algorithms that will do all the processing work in the Collaboratory. Aside from additions to the core Transit Detection Algorithm (TDA), we're putting together the pieces for the first-ever automated Stellar Classification engine that will compare targets against known stellar types. This will not only help optimize TDA searches, it will also help you classify stars more completely and share that important data with the larger scientific community.
We're continuing to donate our time and code to the BOINC project (http://boinc.berkeley.edu/), which provides our distributed computing management layer. PlanetQuest team members are collaborating with BOINC programmers and the larger open source community to make BOINC the best, most robust distributed computing platform ever devised.
We're also putting the finishing touches on a Macromedia Flash-based preview Collaboratory demo that we hope to post to the site soon. Stay tuned!
**Astronomy and Observing**
We have arrived at that most exciting time of year-requests for time at observatories and the beginning of our observing season! The Milky Way is rising to be in the optimal position for our telescopes to gather the maximum amount of data on a huge number of stars. Soon we will begin observing at the Crossley telescope at Lick Observatory (http://mthamilton.ucolick.org/) on Mt. Hamilton, above the city of San Jose, California. Our observing season there will run from the beginning of June through September-long nights of taking images of stars in the most densely crowded region of Sagittarius. Our astronomers will be working a minimum of 12-hour days, beginning around 7 pm, and straight through the night until after dawn every night that is clear enough for observing. (You can see how our weather is by checking http://mthamilton.ucolick.org/hamcam .) Because we use the photometric transit (light measuring) method, weather conditions (clouds, fog) and the atmosphere over the observatory have a large impact on our ability to take good images (also called taking data). A historical note: the Crossley is a Victorian-era telescope using state-of-the-art equipment for a cutting-edge science/distributed-computing project! An incredible contrast and a tribute to the Crossley-quite a story in itself. Incidentally, the Crossley was the world's first modern reflector, and Lick Observatory the world's first professional mountain-top observatory.
We are manufacturing a new prime focus spider mount to accommodate a corrector that will increase the field of view of the Crossley to a much wider angle (40 by 40 arcminutes) in order to record hundreds of thousands of stars. We are collaborating with the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York and using a state-of-the-art Kodak back-lit, blue-sensitive CCD (charge couple device).
We are currently awaiting word on an observing proposal at a telescope in the Southern Hemisphere, also for observing time during June.
**Our Fundraising Efforts**
Fundraising efforts are also proceeding on multiple fronts, as we work to educate potential donors about exactly who we are, why this project is world-class, worthwhile, and important to the global community from both the educational and scientific standpoints. 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 (we've made this easy right on our website (http://www.planetquest.org/support/), and tell your friends and colleagues about us. For the price of two hot chocolates 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**
"Mortal though I be, yea ephemeral, if but a moment I gaze up at the night's starry domain of heaven, Then no longer on earth I stand; I touch the Creator, And my lively spirit drinketh immortality."
Claudius Ptolemy (140 AD, Astronomer)
===================================
Best Wishes,
Laurance Doyle, PhD
President and Cofounder
David Gutelius, PhD
Executive Director and Cofounder
me-[at]-rescam.org
RE: PlanetQuest BOINC project
)
me-[at]-rescam.org
Everything you need to know
)
Everything you need to know about the upcoming PlanetQuest BOINC project!
Click on either button below for current PQ information, public discussion, and future PQ updates!
(If you so desire feel free to copy these buttons to use on your own webpage!)
Clicking my sig will always take you to PlanetQuest's interactive 3D New Worlds Atlas!
me-[at]-rescam.org
|- CLOSED - CLOSED - CLOSED -
)
|- CLOSED - CLOSED - CLOSED - CLOSED - CLOSED - CLOSED - CLOSED - CLOSED - CLOSED - CLOSED -|
|- CLOSED - CLOSED - CLOSED - CLOSED - CLOSED - CLOSED - CLOSED - CLOSED - CLOSED - CLOSED -|
me-[at]-rescam.org
PlanetQuest Collaboratory
)
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!