Ask HN: What citizen science projects are you working on?

I've been curious lately about what projects out there exist within the realm of Citizen Science. It's kind of hard to find a project that I want to be a part of. I've looked (and still looking) at SciStarter to help me in my search.

The one project that I've found (through the Moon Society Slack channel) that I ended up joining, is Lunar Homestead (http://lunarhomestead.com/). They're working on research involving lunar habitation and the like and they're definitely in the realm of "citizen science".

After a while I figured it might be a good idea to ask the community here to get a better idea of what could exist. So...

What citizen science projects are you working on? Are you looking for others to contribute? What tools besides SciStarter would you recommend for me to find other projects?

18 points | by jessehorne 1555 days ago

4 comments

  • elkos 1555 days ago
    I not sure that it could be something you are interested in but, I'm kinda biased since I'm now part of the team. I would suggest checking out SatNOGS. It's a stack of open-source technologies build to create a global satellite ground-station network. It's using software defined radios to create a global network of satellite ground-stations.

    There's a wiki with lots of information about the project. https://wiki.satnogs.org

    If you'd like you can check out the network web service: https://network.satnogs.org

    Some of the data collected by the network are visualised in a Grafana instance: https://dashboard.satnogs.org

    All data collected from the network are openly available. So we collect and in many cases decode data that are publicly transmitted, like data from scientific and experimental cubesats, weather satellites and radio amateur communications.

    The project is run by Libre Space Foundation (https://libre.space), we interested in building open-space technologies and as such we maintain several open-hardware and free software projects on our repositories (https://gitlab.com/librespacefoundation).

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    • jessehorne 1555 days ago
      I had actually heard of SatNOGS before but forgot about it. I'm definitely going to look into the project in more detail. Thank you for sharing!
  • tambeb 1555 days ago
    I have a "Raspberry Shake & Boom" (https://raspberryshake.org/products/raspberry-shake-boom/) set up in my basement. It's a Raspberry Pi-based seismograph and infrasound detector.

    These are its live feeds:

    https://raspberryshake.net/stationview/#?net=AM&sta=R0835

    https://raspberryshake.net/stationview/boom/stationview/#?ne...

    For anyone taking a look at the feeds, depending on the time of day they can show tons of noise from the surrounding neighborhood. But the device is pretty awesome, I can generally detect quakes over 6.0 anywhere in the world. The two links below are a 6.2 in Alaska about 45 minutes ago, and the large quake in Peru last year (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Peru_earthquake).

    https://photos.app.goo.gl/4D69cjA66Y3jAH7q9

    https://photos.app.goo.gl/yPMRtA7EJstZWx4y7

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    • jessehorne 1555 days ago
      That's pretty interesting. I started to wonder how seismographs work recently (blame Taal) and how they're used to measure earthquakes as well as monitor volcanic activity. I may be investigating this tech further, soon.
  • probinso 1555 days ago
    I participate in or track:

    HappyWhale

    aloha cabled observatory, orcasound

    phjordphyto, icewatch

    darksky.org

    There are a lot of citizen science projects sponsored by universities. eBird is an example that is very strong

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  • hsikka 1555 days ago
    I don’t know if this qualifies as Citizen science in the traditional sense, but I’m planning on doing a lot more I’d ependent research in Machine Learning this year. My focus is on Neural Architecture Search, Modularity, and biologically inspired prior in deep learning. I’ve written a bit about it here: https://www.harshsikka.me/the-diy-phd/