Q2 Data Release and Site Upgrades
We wanted to talk more about the changes to the site and give you all an update on the addition of Quarter 2 data. John’s already talked about the candidates page and some of the new features associated with that, so I wanted to focus on the changes specific to Q2 data release.
NASA and the Kepler team released Quarter 2 on Feb 1st and on Feb 2nd the latest results from the Kepler mission including a complete list of planet candidates and false positives for the first 2 quarters of data. You can read the paper detailing all of this here as well as the Kepler press conference site
The second data release is 90 days so we now have the first approximately 120 days of the Kepler science mission to go through. Q1 was about 35 days, we have chosen to show chunks of the lightcurve in the same size as we were for Q1. So Q2 is broken into three sections. Our aim was to have 5 days worth of overlap in each section, so that we don’t miss any transits that happen at the starts and ends of where we separated the lightcurves. We’re also uploading the Q1 data from the ~400 stars originally withheld and released on Feb 1st. We’ll keep you all posted on the progress.
We have been uploading the new data in batches to make the transition as smooth and seamless as possible. Occasionally the Talk links lag behind because we’re trying to upload as fast as you’re all going through the data. And sometimes you beat us to it
so we’ve increased how fast we’re uploading the Q2 data to keep up with your pace. We’ve appreciated all your patience during this process.
You can tell which part of the lightcurve you are looking at by the APH#. The first two numbers are quarter and section so APH22332480 is section 2 of Quarter 2. We use APH for the lightcurve sections and SPH for referring to the star itself. For the SPH numbers the first two numbers refer to what quarter the star first appeared in the public data set. so SPH21332480 first appeared is Quarter 2 Section 1.
The star source pages (like http://www.planethunters.org/sources/SPH10129795) contain all the sections of lightcurve for you to review and the x-axis is the days from the first observation, so you can look for repeat transits in other sections of the lightcurve easily. Also the downloadable CSV file now contains all the available lightcurve data. We have also updated the gap question (the first question asked) in the classify interface, so now you will now be asked the variability questions regardless of how your answer the gap question (before the variability questions were skipped if you answered yes to their being a data glitch or gap in the lightcurve)
We’ve made some changes to Talk to accommodate the Q2 data. The new planet candidates list and false positive list from the Kepler team are now identified. We’re planning in the near future of marking Planet Hunters planet candidates as well. Each lightcurve section has it’s own object page (ie http://talk.planethunters.org/objects/APH22332480). We now have group pages that gather all the available lightcurve object pages for the star (http://talk.planethunters.org/groups/SPH21332480) which you can access through the “View Star” link on any of the object pages. The “Examine Star” link will take you directly to the star’s source page.
As always we welcome feedback on the new changes, and we are listening to your comments and suggestions on Talk and in your emails. We can’t wait to see what we find in the Quarter 2 data.
Happy Hunting,
Talk Updates
Our two new community collaboration websites, Milky Way Talk and Planet Hunters Talk, had some updates this week. We thought it was worth going over them in this blog post. We’ve had a lot of feedback about Talk and are working to implement the most-requested features.
The biggest difference you’ll see when logging into Talk is that your discussions are now easier to manage and track. A new, large box on the main page shows all the new and updated discussions since your last login. You can refine these using the two drop-down boxes at the top of this section. You can chose to show discussions from the last 24 hours, the last week, or since any date using a pop-up calendar. You can also chose to only see discussions that you are a part of, which should help you keep track of your conversations.
In addition to these changes, you’ll also find a lot more metadata around the discussions, telling you who last posted, how many people are taking part, and who started the discussion, where relevant. Users within these discussions are now highlighted if they are part of the development team or the science team. This is something a lot of you asked for.
The other item that has been changed with this Talk update is pagination. There are now easy-to-use buttons on the discussions, collections and objects on the front page. These mean that you can browse back through time and see more than just the most recent items. As Talk has grown more popular, this feature has become more necessary.
Another change to the front page is that we now show the most-recent items by default, and not the trending items. You can still see the trending items by clicking the link at the top. Users told us they preferred to see recent activity initially so we made the change. Similarly, the ‘trending keywords’ list now appears on the front page at all times.
On Planet Hunters Talk, when you’re viewing a light curve, Kepler Planet Candidates are now identified as a “Kepler Favorite”.
Finally, page titles are now meaningful. This means that if you bookmark or share a link, you’ll remember why. Collections are named and objects will be title dusing their Zooniverse ID (e.g. APH….). Several of you have also noted our lack of a favicon (the little icon next to the URL in your browser bar). This is coming shortly as well.
There are more changes planned for Talk, but these significant updates to the front page were worth noting on the blog. For example, we plan to start integrating social media links into the Talk sites, along with more updates as time goes by. Talk continues to evolve and we welcome feedback. Post comments and suggestions on the Feature Requests Thread or Board Upgrades thread on Talk or send us an email at team@planethunters.org.
Planet Hunters 