Rose City Astronomers General Meeting

*NEW DATE*

Citizen Science Astronomy with a Network of Small Digital Telescopes: From Planetary Defense to Exoplanet Transits

Dr. Franck Marchis, senior planetary astronomer and chair of the exoplanet group at the Carl Sagan Center of the SETI Institute and Chief Scientific Officer and Founder at Unistellar, will be discussing the Enhanced Vision Telescope or eVscope.

The SETI Institute and Unistellar are reinventing popular astronomy with the Enhanced Vision Telescope: a combination of optics, electronics, and image-processing technology to make astronomy easy, fun and interactive. We are building the largest network of telescopes capable of observing the sky 24/7 from everywhere on this planet. Unistellar's Enhanced Vision Telescope is the first telescope that accumulates light so the user can finally see hundreds of faint astronomical objects in colors live through its eyepiece.  Relying on its on-board computer, the telescope also recognizes the observed area and can guide and inform the user in real time expanding the interest for astronomy to a broader audience.

Thanks to its sensitivity, the eVscope is a powerful tool capable of generating data that can be used by scientists to search for transient events like supernovae, exoplanet signatures, near-earth asteroids, and comets. The constellation of small and smart telescopes from our network will provide additional data to support the few existing large telescopes. We identified and developed scientific applications for our network of telescopes in 2018 and the network of citizen astronomers has already collected successful observations from creating a super-image of the Comet Atlas in April 2020, to detecting Jupiter-size exoplanets orbiting around sun-like stars, and  also collecting occultation data around the world to support NASA Lucy mission. We will summarize the technology behind the telescope and its real-time data processing, then describe several new scientific results from our network. Finally, we will discuss Unistellar network's potential to make citizen astronomy a reality by offering all users (newbie or experienced) a tool to explore the night sky with a powerful and reliable instrument while they contribute to scientific investigations.

For more information visit https://www.rosecityastronomers.net/calendar/2020/7/rca-general-meeting