SuperWASP Blog
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Find us at the British Science Festival!
23 August 2022, by Adam McMaster in Black Hole Hunters
Black Hole Hunters will be at the British Science Fesival in Leicester, UK, next month. Come and find us on Saturday 17 September, where you'll have the chance to chat to us about black holes, SuperWASP, and all the things we're finding thanks to your classifications on the Zooniverse. …
"Real or Junk?" will be back soon
08 August 2022, by Adam McMaster in Variable Stars
In November I wrote that we had added a large batch of 400,000 subjects to the Real or junk? workflow on SuperWASP Variable Stars. I'm pleased to report that all of those subjects have now been completed!
It's been about a year and a half since we launched the …
British Science Week: Astronomy needs you!
17 March 2022, by Adam McMaster in Black Hole Hunters
As part of British Science Week, we hosted a live panel discussion and Q&A where we talked about the connection between the coming “big data” era in astronomy and the increasing importance of citizen science projects for training machine learning models.
Check out the event web page for more …
An update on “Real or Junk?”
26 November 2021, by Adam McMaster in Variable Stars
We recently added a big new batch of subjects to our Real or Junk? workflow, so I thought this was a good time to give you an update on our progress with that and what we’re planning to do next.
Real or Junk? is the new way to classify that …
Black Hole Hunters has launched!
29 October 2021, by Adam McMaster in Black Hole Hunters
Our new project, Black Hole Hunters, has officially launched on the Zooniverse. This project asks volunteers – you! – to look for the telltale signs of hidden black holes in SuperWASP light curves. We’re looking for an effect called gravitational microlensing, where an otherwise invisible black hole briefly …
VeSPA in Research Notes of the AAS
14 October 2021, by Adam McMaster in Variable Stars
Research Notes of the AAS has just published our short write up of VeSPA and our first data release. Here’s the abstract:
We present the first results from the SuperWASP Variable Stars (SVS) citizen science project. The photometry archive of the Wide Angle Search for Planets has previously been searched …
Check out our new light curve viewer!
06 October 2021, by Adam McMaster in Variable Stars
VeSPA got an upgrade last week when I added a new light curve viewer to the source details page (that’s the page that shows you information about a particular object and each of the folding periods that have been classified on the Zooniverse). The new viewer has a few notable …
The VeSPA data release archive
01 October 2021, by Adam McMaster in Variable Stars
This week I added a new Data Releases page to the website. This is where you can download an export of every version of the VeSPA data, so that each version is permanently available even after the main VeSPA catalogue has been updated with new Zooniverse classifications.
Each data release …
Getting Black Hole Hunters ready for launch
24 September 2021, by Adam McMaster in Black Hole Hunters
Our upcoming project, Black Hole Hunters, recently went through the Zooniverse beta review process. Thanks to everyone who took the time to review the project! We received a lot of useful feedback and we’re planning to make some changes to the project before it launches.
First, we’ll be improving …
Our new website and VeSPA
08 September 2021, by Adam McMaster in Variable Stars
We’ve recently launched the new superwasp.org website and today we’ve added this blog to it. Look out for regular updates on what we’re working on and how the project is going!
The new website includes a new feature called VeSPA: The Variable Star Photometry Archive containing all the results from …
Acknowledgements
The SuperWASP project is currently funded and operated by Warwick University and Keele University, and was originally set up by Queen’s University Belfast, the Universities of Keele, St. Andrews and Leicester, the Open University, the Isaac Newton Group, the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, the South African Astronomical Observatory and by STFC.
The Zooniverse project on SuperWASP Variable Stars is led by Andrew Norton (The Open University) and builds on work he has done with his former postgraduate students Les Thomas, Stan Payne, Marcus Lohr, Paul Greer, and Heidi Thiemann, and current postgraduate student Adam McMaster.
The Zooniverse project on SuperWASP Variable Stars was developed with the help of the ASTERICS Horizon2020 project. ASTERICS is supported by the European Commission Framework Programme Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation action under grant agreement n.653477
VeSPA was designed and developed by Adam McMaster as part of his postgraduate work. This work is funded by STFC, DISCnet, and the Open University Space SRA. Server infrastructure was funded by the Open University Space SRA.