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Here are a few things you might like to know about the images you see in
Disk Detective. The red crosshairs are 2.1
arcseconds across. The red circle is
10.5 arcseconds in radius. The whole Disk Detective
image is 60 arcseconds across. An
arcsecond is about the size of a dime seen from a mile away.
For example: the angular diameter of the planet Neptune as
seen from Earth is about 150 arcseconds.
In these images, the bright objects appear white
or light blue. The empty sky around them
appears black or a mottled black-and-blue pattern.
That mottling is noise. You'll want to focus your
attention on the white and light-blue areas. At
Disk Detective, we find new disks by looking at the object
in images taken with several different telescopes. The images are
arranged in a flip book, which you can play by clicking on the play button on the lower left.
A good candidate is small and round
and mostly contained within the red circle--like this object.
Sometimes bright objects, like this one on the left,
can have diffraction spikes that stick out beyond the red circle. These can
also be good candidates. We're not as interested in objects that are
outside the red circle, but if you like you can click on
the icon in the upper right and discuss them on talk.
Here on the talk page, you can see the image ID
in the upper-left-hand corner. You can also click on the
collect button to favorite your image, to start a collection of your
favorite images. You can type your own comments
into the blue box, and you can read comments that
other people have written. SED stands
for Spectral Energy Distribution. That's a plot
of how bright this object is in each of the infrared wavelengths
that you saw in the flip book. Looking at SEDs
can help us figure out whether the object is really a star with a disk
or whether it's some other kind object, maybe a galaxy.
Click on the "More info in SIMBAD" button to access a powerful
database of astronomical objects. This
line in SIMBAD tells you the angular distance in arcseconds
between the Disk Detective object and this SIMBAD object
to help you make sure you are looking at the right thing. SIMBAD is a great
resource, but doesn't have information on every Disk Detective
object. Also, SIMBAD is sometimes wrong, so don't
discount an object just because SIMBAD has labeled it as a quasar,
like this one. If you use a
hashtag in your comments, people will be able to find your comments easily
by searching for that hashtag. After you've watched the flip book
at least once, you can select the classification of this object
by clicking on the rectangles. This looks like a good candidate
since it looks round, and fairly concentrated, so I'll click "None
of the Above/Good Candidate" Then I'll click on the
"Finish" button to record my classification.
If you've gotten this far, congratulations, you've just classified
an object. Thank you for helping NASA find new planetary
systems.
[Beeping]