Identify potential spikes or image artifacts, or if the image extends beyond the circles. Pay attention to the name of the telescope in the top of the image, as this will help you identify potential problems with the images.

Project Plans

Your plan should be no more than 250 words for each project, so 500 words total. Hand your plan in on Quercus by uploading your DOC, DOCX, or PDF file to the Term Project Plan assignment submission page, where you will find full instructions. What you need to submit for your plan is in each project description (see below).

Project #1 Description
Use the Disk Detective project to identify the disks around nearby stars where planets may be forming.

Go to https://whttps://www.zooniverse.org/projects/ssilverberg/disk-detective/classify (links to an external site) (Links to an external site.)

Select the “Tutorial” tab. For each potential planet host, you will press the ‘play’ button to click through a few images of the same star taken with different telescopes. You can manually click through the images using the round buttons on the bottom. You will be asked to identify if the star has a suitable debris disk around it (if the disk is round and contained within the outer circle in all the telescope images), or to identify potential spikes or image artifacts, or if the image extends beyond the circles. Pay attention to the name of the telescope in the top of the image, as this will help you identify potential problems with the images.

After completing the tutorial, analyze 5 potential stars. Take screenshots of all the telescope images for your candidate star (12 per task), to help justify your classification of the potential debris disk.

What to Include in The Project Plan
Research debris disks and star formation and talk about how you will use Zooniverse. What resources will you use to complete this project? (Remember to include Zooniverse.)

Project #2 Description
Use the Radio Galaxy Zoo: LOFAR project to help find supermassive black holes at the centres of galaxies and galaxies where stars are forming.

Go to https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/chrismrp/radio-galaxy-zoo-lofar/classify (links to an external site) (Links to an external site.)

Select the “Tutorial” tab. For each galaxy, you may be asked to place a “+” marker inside a blue dashed ellipse if it seems to belong in the same radio region (shown by the yellow lines) as the main solid blue ellipse. If there do not seem to be any dashed ellipses that match the radio region of the solid ellipse, you can move on.

For some images, you will also be able to match the optical image (shown as the background) to the radio emission (shown by the yellow lines and blue ellipses). If you think you can identify a single point (‘counterpart’) on the optical image that is generating the radio emission, mark it with a pink “+”. If there does not seem to be an optical source, you can move on.

The tutorials will give you some feedback on how you are doing before you start. After completing the tutorial, analyze 5 different images. Take before and after screenshots of each image that show the image before you have identified the centres of the matching dashed ellipses and the optical counterpart.

What to Include in The Project Plan
Research radio emission from galaxies and talk about how you will use Zooniverse. What resources will you use to complete this project? (Remember to include Zooniverse.)