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INTRODUCING ASTROTAGS

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INTRODUCING ASTROTAGS How amateur photographers can make a map of space Photo by orvaratli ASTRONOMY PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEAR To mark International Year of Astronomy ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: INTRODUCING ASTROTAGS


1
INTRODUCING ASTROTAGS How amateur photographers
can make a map of space
Photo by orvaratli
2
ASTRONOMY PHOTOGRAPHER OF THE YEARTo mark
International Year of Astronomy 2009, the Royal
Observatory Greenwich decided to launch Astronomy
Photographer of the Year. It was going to be a
traditional photo competition, but
3
DIGITAL OUTREACH ON FLICKR Running the
competition on Flickr not only let us reach a
dedicated, worldwide community of
astrophotographers, but a whole bunch of people
who might not know they were interested in
astronomy. It also made us askWhats the space
equivalent of geotagging?
4
THERE WASNT AN EASY ANSWERIts not like
putting a pin in a map. Things in space move
about and there are the added dimensions of depth
and time. The question was, how could we make
astrotagging easy for amateurs?
5
ANSWER PART ONE THE ASTROTAGGING
ROBOT Astrometry.net already had a Flickr group
with a robot that calculated the astrometry of
submitted photos, then added the results as notes
and comments. Could it add machine tags too?
6

RESULTS APPEAR AS THREE PART MACHINE
TAGS astroRA23.3534170222 astroDec30.6174596
384 astropixelScale3.50 astroorientation-12.
78 astrofieldsize1.56 x 1.04 degrees
astronameNGC 598 astronameM 33
astronameTriangulum galaxy
Photo by Skiwalker79
7
BUT WHAT ABOUT STUFF LIKE PLANETS? We decided
that if people took a photo of a planet or comet,
they probably meant to, and so knew their
subject. So this is the bit thats done by hand,
along with a tag for date and time. astrogmt200
8-03-22T0640 astrosubjectsaturn
Photo by Ethan Allen
8
EXPLAINING IT ALL Having worked out how to do
astrotagging we needed to explain it to our
visitors. We wrote illustrated guides called
Astrotags explained, and How the astrotagging
robot works. We also commissioned a short
animated film.
9
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10
WHAT CAN ASTROTAGS DO? Flickr already has a
public API, which means astrotags are immediately
accessible to anyone who wants to play around
with them. At the ROG weve made a mashup with
Google Sky.
11
ANYTHING ELSE? For non-specialist audiences
photos that belong to them and their friends are
a huge draw. Robot and hand-made astrotags mean
there is the potential to use these photos
en-masse to help explain science.
Exhibitions Online Planetarium Installations Mob
ile
Photo by giumaiolini
12
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13
AND COULD PHOTOS FROM PROFESSIONAL SCIENCE BE
ASTROTAGGED TOO? Machine tags can be used to
link blog posts, photos and events together. And
Flickrs Title and Description fields can be
called via their API which means astrotags could
be an easy way for science centres to harvest the
latest imagery using existing infrastructure.

Photo by Nik Szymanek
14
AND FINALLY Using the publics photos means we
have people stories as well as science stories.
For us, the result was that Astronomy
Photographer of the Year appeared on the Flickr
blog twice, across the web, in every UK
broadsheet and in several tabloids it even
made the front page of the Sun online
15
Photo by Pere Sanz
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