Exoplanet Watch: Inviting Citizen Scientists to Observe Transiting Exoplanets - Livestream

Join the Night Sky Network and Robert Zellem to learn how to participate in the discovery of exoplanets.

On January 10, 2023, Exoplanet Watch was announced as NASA’s newest citizen science project studying exoplanets, or planets that orbit stars beyond our solar system. The project is growing daily, and we’re encouraging astronomers who have telescopes with a tracking mount and a camera to participate in the project by making your own observations of exoplanet transits. We’ll show you how, when, and where to look! We’ll also show you how to use our free EXOTIC (Exoplanet Timing Interpretation Code) software to make your own light curves. If you have more data than time to process it, you can contribute your own observations of transiting exoplanets so that other citizen scientists can make their own light curves. Exoplanet Watch participants have studied 275 different exoplanets so far, and created more than 1,500 light curves. With your help, we can expand the reach of the project. We have participants in 24 time zones already, but the more participants we have, the better. Your work will help make the timing for upcoming James Webb Space Telescope exoplanet observations more precise, freeing up valuable space telescope time for other scientists. If your observations or your light curves are used in a scientific paper, you will get credit as a co-author on the paper. We’ll walk you through our website and how to participate in the project.

Speaker: Robert Zellem, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

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