Today’s post comes from Thomas Esty, our undergraduate  summer student working on Planet Hunters.

Hello again, Planet Hunters.

I’m happy to say that we are now rolling out the new Site Guide.  It includes a collection of information from the science page, the early blogs and some all new stuff.  We also have examples of the different types of light curves so that you can all see prototypical regular, irregular, pulsating, and quiet curves.  I’ve been putting it together piece by piece for a couple weeks while also working on doing modeling and coding to analyze the best of your classifications so far.  I hope that it will help get more people involved in this project.  If you have friends who you haven’t introduced to Planet Hunters, now is a great time.  You’ll be able to find the new material under the Tutorial tab as Site Guide.  We’ve recently passed 3.5 million classifications and are still going strong.  With a paper in the pipeline, the classifications rolling in, plenty of data left to analyze, and conferences coming up, we’d like to thank all of you for your hard working in making Planet Hunters so successful in just over 7 months of operation.

As always, Happy Hunting.

Thomas Esty

To celebrate Planet Hunters turning six months old we’ve created this massive poster [27MB download] containing the names of our community of more than 30,000 volunteers*! We hope you enjoy it, and that you are able to find your name in amongst the many that make up this lovely image of a planetary system far, far away.

Don’t forget to join us this afternoon/evening/other for our first ever live video chat on UStream. We’ll be answering your questions from 8pm UT – which is 9pm in London and 4pm in New York. Come and see Meg Schwamb, Chris Lintott and Stuart Lynn answering your questions by visiting the Zooniverse UStream channel.

*Names are only shown for users who gave permission for us to show their name on the Zooniverse account settings. To update your settings login to  https://www.zooniverse.org/account and update the ‘name’ field.

In honor of Planet Hunters half-birthday on Thursday (June 16th) we’ll be hosting our first ever Zooniverse live chat. Chris Lintott, Stuart Lynn, and Meg Schwamb from the Planet Hunters team will be answering your questions live on UStream.  Come join us as we discuss all things Planet Hunters and Zooniverse, tell you what the science team has been up to, and answer your burning questions. You can submit questions via PH Talk by posting at this thread or via twitter tweeting your question to @planethunters with the #phlivechat hashtag.

To take part on the day you just need to visit the Zooniverse’s UStream channel on Thursday at 8pm UT (that’s 9pm in London, 4pm in New York, etc*). We’ll be going through the questions you’ve asked online, and chatting with you about the project via UStream’s chat box.

We hope to see you there!

*Thursday 8pm UT is 1pm PDT, 4pm EDT, 9pm BST, 10pm CEST and Friday 6am AEST.

It’s to hard to believe it’s been nearly 6 months since Planet Hunters went live. We have been blown away by the response to the project, and the team wanted to celebrate the 6 month milestone as a way of saying thank you to all of you hunting for transits in the light curves and for all the time and effort you all put into making Planet Hunters a success. We started thinking of things we could do. The suggestion of doing a live chat came up and Chris,Rob, and I jumped on board.

We will be hosting a live chat on June 16th to discuss all things Planet Hunters and Zooniverse, tell you what the science team has been up to, and answer your burning questions. You can submit questions via PH Talk by posting at this thread or via twitter tweeting your question to @planethunters with the #phlivechat hashtag. We’ll also answer some live questions submitted during the chat as well. 

Save the date June 16 9 pm BST/ 4pm EST – more details to follow soon!

We hope to see you there to celebrate 6 months of Planet Hunters.

This weekend we hit the 3 million mark for the number of classifications made by the PH community, thanks to all of you. On behalf of the entire team, I want to say a big  thank you to everyone for all of your hard work and your time.  We can’t believe in the  span of 6 months we’ve gone from 0 to 3 million classifications.

So what does this mean for the project? Well we’ve completed the Quarter 1 data released in June 2010, finished about 20% of the Quarter 2 data, and we have uploaded ~5800 new light curves from Q1 that were released in Feb onto the site.  So not to worry, we still have plenty of Kepler data to sift through. The science team is working hard at following up our planet candidates with the Keck telescopes and developing  better algorithms to search the classification database and go from transit boxes to extracting transits and planet candidates (just this past week I spent some time at the Adler Planetarium with Chris working on this.  More on that to come soon).

I thought  it might be interesting to take a look at some of the user statistics for Planet Hunters (all these numbers are as of a few days ago). We’ve had over 40,000 people make classifications, with 27,142 from logged in Zooniverse users. The bulk of our classifications come from zooites with Zooniverse IDs. On average a typical logged-in PH user has examined 104  stars and non-logged in users look at about 3 stars.  About 86% of our logged in zooites, classify 100 light curves or less.  71 uses have classified over 5,000 light curves, and 19 have hit the 10,000 mark (Congratulations to all of you, and you know who you are 🙂 ). Two users have classified over 50,000 light curves with a single user having looked at over 88,000 light curves since the project launched. Thanks again to everyone for all your classifications.

Happy Hunting and onward towards 6 million classifications,

~Meg

Introducing the new and fantastic  Planetometer™ created by Planet Hunters lead developer Stuart Lynn. Here you can watch the number of classifications in real time. Additionally we’re streaming the planet candidates and the usernames of those who identified them. If you have a mac you can also make the Planetometer™ as your screensaver. Download the dmg here. As part of Chicago’s Adler Planetarium’s Spring Break at the Adler Seo Company (March 24-April 24) Planet Hunters is being featured and the Planetometer™ is being streamed live there for everyone to see.

Cheers,
~Meg and Stuart