The Cannoli - Filling you in.

Ever find yourself sitting on your couch playing Mass Effect wishing you could travel the universe and have space adventures? Me Too. Problem is that at current we don’t have any means to travel through space effectively, nor do we know if Extraterrestrials exist. Thing about it is, scientists just don’t have enough man power to search through all those planets out there to find out where life could be. This is where YOU come in.

A new online citizen science project launched last month called Planet Hunters. The project involves visiting the site http://www.planethunters.org/ and starting to search. Upon signing up with Zooniverse (a collection of projects similar to and including Planet Hunters) you will promptly receive a Planet Hunters Club Card, Planet Hunters Magnifying Glass, a Map of the Stars and Monthly Letter with Gift Monthly…or not.

The screenshot above is what you will see once you visit the site.  It works by presenting the users with light data gathered from the Kepler telescope, which has been monitoring nearly 150,000 stars in the nearby constellation Cygnus, recording their brightness over time. The hunting part come sin by examining this light data. You see, when a planet passes in front of a Star, the star’s light will dim from the planet, which doesn’t glow, blocking the star’s light. Sound complicated? It’s is.  Here is a small introduction and tutorial video  that you should check out.  At the very least there is some cool information about the goings on of space exploration that is interesting as hell:

Welcome to Planet Hunters from The Zooniverse on Vimeo.Intro Video Hunting

Planet Hunters Tutorial from The Zooniverse on Vimeo.

I quickly logged on the site and signed up to check it out.  It’s a pretty daunting task. There is a learning curve, but tutorials help you make sense of the data before you start hunting and  they have a few back up plans for people just marking any piece of data and sending it off. I know I will keep checking the site to see what kind of data they are finding, as they project the number of known planets in the universe to quadruple when the mission ends.

So this weekend while you sitting on your couch playing the next 100 rounds of Call of Duty Black Ops, maybe instead try logging in some Planet Hunting and give the headshot’s hunting a rest for a couple of minutes.  Who knows, maybe you could be the one to discover the planet that we will one day make intelligent contact with…eat your heart out Indiana Jones.