A Brief PANOPTES Update
Those of us contributing to Project PANOPTES have been very busy with the project, but this blog and the project's Facebook page give you the impression that the project is dormant. Social media isn't my thing, much as I wish I was better at it.
So, what has been going on?
On the science side, there is an increasing focus on getting the data analysis automated and producing new light curves. The last time one was published was years ago, based on an early prototype telescope and algorithm. That program worked one star at a time, under human direction, which clearly doesn't scale well to thousands or 10's of thousands of stars in an image. We've had multiple image processing meetings starting in early May, and Wilfred is focusing on this area as part of his PhD work at Maquarie University in Sydney. A challenge we encounter is that it is difficult to get everybody together (virtually, via Google Hangouts) at the same time due to the time zones we're in: US Eastern, Pacific and Hawaii, plus Australian Eastern. In addition, at least four members of the team are involved in night observing professionally, so may be sleeping when we meet, which is usually centered around noon in Hawaii. Ah, the glories of international collaborations. 😉
On the community and communication front, we've successfully launched a Discourse forum at https://forum.projectpanoptes.org/. For several years the primary means of communication within the team has been Slack, but we needed publicly visible discussions, which makes it easier for more folks to see what is going on, and for search engines to find and index the content. I've been very pleased to see that we've started to have questions answered by non-core team members, a vital step to growing the community.
One critique the teams has received is that the instructions for building the telescope are scattered and incomplete (I know this all to well having made my way to the ends of the written instructions, and then had to figure a bunch out, or pester busy folks to fill-in the gaps I couldn't fathom). We've launched an effort to bring all those scattered instructions together into a single document; we're most of the way through merging and cleaning up the existing contents, and have identified many gaps to be filled, but filling those will be a challenge that may take us some months to achieve. Volunteers are welcome!
Regarding face-to-face outreach, here are some of the events with a PANOPTES presence:
March: Wilfred presented PANOPTES at SCALE in Pasadena, CA.
April: Josh, Joe, Sean and I attended NEAF in Suffern, NY, where we manned a PANOPTES booth, and where Josh twice delivered a talk about PANOPTES.
May: Jen, Wilfred and I staffed a PANOPTES exhibit at Google I/O, designed by Jen, featuring a transit demo that drew in many visitors, as did a partially completed PANOPTES robotic telescope.
June: Olivier manned the PANOPTES exhibit at Explore JPL, featuring the JPL made copy of the PANOPTES design. Quite a challenge to speak to thousands of attendees solo! And this week there are two events with a PANOPTES presence: SPIE in Austin has 4 of the original team members (Olivier, Nem, Luc and Wilfred) attending, with Wilfred giving a presentation, participating in a poster session, and holding a meet 'n greet; and the first two builders after the original team, Doug and Christina, will be a SAS in Ontario, CA, where they'll have a PANOPTES poster on display.
Coming up in July, several of us will attend and speak at RTSRE/iNATS in Hilo, Hawaii (active volcano territory!). Our plans are for Olivier to kick things off with an intro to Project PANOPTES; I'll follow up with an experience report about building a telescope; then we'll have a talk about processing the collected data in the cloud; and finally we'll wrap up with an open panel discussion about PANOPTES.
So, what has been going on?
On the science side, there is an increasing focus on getting the data analysis automated and producing new light curves. The last time one was published was years ago, based on an early prototype telescope and algorithm. That program worked one star at a time, under human direction, which clearly doesn't scale well to thousands or 10's of thousands of stars in an image. We've had multiple image processing meetings starting in early May, and Wilfred is focusing on this area as part of his PhD work at Maquarie University in Sydney. A challenge we encounter is that it is difficult to get everybody together (virtually, via Google Hangouts) at the same time due to the time zones we're in: US Eastern, Pacific and Hawaii, plus Australian Eastern. In addition, at least four members of the team are involved in night observing professionally, so may be sleeping when we meet, which is usually centered around noon in Hawaii. Ah, the glories of international collaborations. 😉
On the community and communication front, we've successfully launched a Discourse forum at https://forum.projectpanoptes.org/. For several years the primary means of communication within the team has been Slack, but we needed publicly visible discussions, which makes it easier for more folks to see what is going on, and for search engines to find and index the content. I've been very pleased to see that we've started to have questions answered by non-core team members, a vital step to growing the community.
One critique the teams has received is that the instructions for building the telescope are scattered and incomplete (I know this all to well having made my way to the ends of the written instructions, and then had to figure a bunch out, or pester busy folks to fill-in the gaps I couldn't fathom). We've launched an effort to bring all those scattered instructions together into a single document; we're most of the way through merging and cleaning up the existing contents, and have identified many gaps to be filled, but filling those will be a challenge that may take us some months to achieve. Volunteers are welcome!
Regarding face-to-face outreach, here are some of the events with a PANOPTES presence:
March: Wilfred presented PANOPTES at SCALE in Pasadena, CA.
April: Josh, Joe, Sean and I attended NEAF in Suffern, NY, where we manned a PANOPTES booth, and where Josh twice delivered a talk about PANOPTES.
May: Jen, Wilfred and I staffed a PANOPTES exhibit at Google I/O, designed by Jen, featuring a transit demo that drew in many visitors, as did a partially completed PANOPTES robotic telescope.
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| Transit demo, with webcam in foreground at right, star and planet at bottom center, and screen showing light curve at the top. |
Coming up in July, several of us will attend and speak at RTSRE/iNATS in Hilo, Hawaii (active volcano territory!). Our plans are for Olivier to kick things off with an intro to Project PANOPTES; I'll follow up with an experience report about building a telescope; then we'll have a talk about processing the collected data in the cloud; and finally we'll wrap up with an open panel discussion about PANOPTES.
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