Epsiodes in Spanish
We are in the process of translating (subtitles) all of our episodes into Spanish. Find a list of all of the ones that have been translated so far here!
Welcome to Planet Hunters Coffee Chat!
Meet Kassie Perlongo, a science communications specialist at NASA Ames Research Center and Nora Eisner, project leader of the citizen science project Planet Hunters TESS from Oxford University. Learn about who they are, what they do, and how you can get find and study exoplanets.
What is the transit method and how is it used to find exoplanets?
In this episode, Kassie Perlongo and Nora Eisner from the Planet Hunters TESS team talk about the technique used to find exoplanets - the transit method. Grab a coffee, tea, or other beverage of your choosing, and get ready to take make real discoveries using real NASA data.
How can you look up target stars with MAST - the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes?
A short introduction on how to use resources to find out more about a star or a planet candidate. Have you found a potential planet candidate on Planet Hunters TESS? Want to find out more about TESS data? Check out the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescope (MAST).
How do you look up an exoplanet candidate with ExoFOP?
Nora introduces Kassie to ExoFOP - The Exoplanet Follow-up Observing Program for TESS. ExoFOP is a useful tool to look at what is already known about a TESS target - is there already a confirmed planet and if so what are its properties? What is the star like? How bright is it? There are the kind of questions you can answer with the help of ExoFOP.
What are the astronomy parameters in the SIMBAD Astronomical Database?
Nora and Kassie answer a question from one of our citizen scientists - what are the astronomy parameters in SIMBAD?
Links:
Jupyter Notebook: https://jupyter.org/
COLAB: https://colab.research.google.com/
Getting started with a coding Notebook
Kassie begins her coding journey! Nora introduces Jupyter Notebooks, and how citizen scientists can use Python to interact with TESS data. This quick tutorial covers how to get started with python coding in a Notebook. It starts off by going over how to run a Jupyter notebook, before moving on to coding in a COLAB notebook. You can find the links to both below. If you're new to coding we suggest that you start off with COLAB, as this is a completely online tool and doesn't require you to dowload anything.
This document will provide some more information on how to get started with both Jupyter Notebook and COLAB.
Plotting data using LightKurve
This tutorial covers how to download TESS data using the lightkurve tool and how to plot it. To get started, open the Colab notebook (this can be found online and doesn’t require installation; however, a Google account is needed). Alternatively, if you have Jupyter notebook already installed on your computer, download the provided Jupyter notebook file and open with your local version of the program. If you haven't already we recommend you watch last weeks video on how to get started with Python.
Link: https://docs.lightkurve.org/
Click the logos to open up the Colab notebook or to download the Jupyter notebook. You can use these to follow along with the video.
Click the logos to open up the Colab notebook or to download the Jupyter notebook. You can use these to follow along with the video.
How do you make your data look beautiful using Lightkurve?
Once you have downloaded and plotted TESS data, you might want to change the colour of the figure, or alter the size of the markers. In this episode Nora and Kassie discuss how to enhance a figure not just to make it look prettier, but also to make the data easier to read and interpret.
Plotting multiple sectors of TESS data
Many of the TESS stars are observed in just one of the TESS sectors, but some are observed in multiple. Watch this video to find out how to plot data from multiple TESS sectors and how to normalize the data.
Click the logos to open up the Colab notebook or to download the Jupyter notebook. You can use these to follow along with the video.