Session 7 – ORALS

Open Astronomy is an important and valuable goal, including the availability of refereed science papers and user-friendly public astronomy data archives. The latter allow and encourage interested researchers from around the world to visualise, analyse and possibly download data from many different science and frequency domains. With the enormous growth of data volumes and complexity, open archives are essential to explore ideas and make discoveries. Open source software is equally important for many reasons, including reproducibility and collaboration. I will present a number of examples, including the CSIRO ASKAP Science Data Archive (CASDA), the Local Volume HI Survey (LVHIS), the 3D Source Finding Application (SoFiA) and the Busy Function (BF). Astronomy is international and includes or links to an incredibly wide range of sciences, computing, engineering, and education. Its open nature can serve as an example for interdisciplinary collaborations.

Big Data in Astronomy and its role in Astronomy Education will be reviewed. At present all-sky and large-area astronomical surveys and their catalogued data span over the whole range of electromagnetic spectrum, from gamma-ray to radio, such as Fermi-GLAST and INTEGRAL in gamma-ray, ROSAT, XMM and Chandra in X-ray, GALEX in UV, SDSS and several POSS1 and POSS2 based catalogues (APM, MAPS, USNO, GSC) in optical range, 2MASS in NIR, WISE and AKARI IRC in MIR, IRAS and AKARI FIS in FIR, NVSS and FIRST in radio and many others, as well as most important surveys giving optical images (DSS I and II, SDSS, etc.), proper motions (Tycho, USNO, Gaia), variability (GCVS, NSVS, ASAS, Catalina, Pan-STARRS) and spectroscopic data (FBS, SBS, Case, HQS, HES, SDSS, CALIFA, GAMA). Most important astronomical databases and archives are presented as well, including Wide-Field Plate DataBase (WFPDB), ESO, HEASARC, IRSA and MAST archives, CDS SIMBAD, VizieR and Aladin, NED and HyperLEDA extragalactic databases, ADS and astro-ph services. They are powerful sources for many-sided efficient research using the Virtual Observatory (VO) environment. It is shown that using and analysis of Big Data accumulated in astronomy lead to many new discoveries. Using these data gives a significant advantage for Astronomy Education due to its attractiveness and due to big interest of young generation to computer science and technologies. The Computer Science itself benefits from data coming from the Universe and a new interdisciplinary science Astroinformatics has been created to manage these data.

GALAXY CRUISE is the first citizen science project promoted by National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), which uses the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program (HSC-SSP) big data. Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC), the wide-field imaging camera mounted on the Subaru Telescope, has 870 million pixels and can cover nine times the area of the full moon in each exposure. HSC-SSP stared in 2014 and astronomers plan to observe for 300 nights throughout the project. The first HSC-SSP dataset and the second dataset was released to the public in 2017 and 2019, respectively. At the GALAXY CRUISE welcome page or the HSC-SSP image viewer «hspMap» public version, anyone can easily explore the vast cosmic images taken by the Subaru Telescope.
GALAXY CRUISE website was developed to invite Citizen Astronomers for participating in the classification of interacting galaxies. To keep their interest, the website has the following unique features. (1) Thorough training and practice menus. All Citizen Astronomers need to complete the three training sessions to obtain a basic knowledge of galaxies so that they can confidently classify galaxies. (2) Gamification Events. Souvenir icons and passport stamps are given to citizen astronomers who complete specific observational areas. (3) Exploration of the Vast Universe. Citizen astronomers enjoy exploring the vast cosmic images captured by the Subaru Telescope, as explained above. Our website launched on November 1, 2019, in Japanese and February 19, 2020, in English. As of September 2020, 4872 people from 77 countries and regions registered, and the total classification results have exceeded 760,000. The «Classify 1000 Galaxies in 1 Month» Campaign from August 1 to 31, 2020, was successful and the total number of classifications has increased 30 % in just one month. In our presentation, we will present the updates of the GALAXY CRUISE, NAOJ’s citizen science project.

The European Exoplanets-A project is aimed at providing a comprehensive view of the nature of exoplanet atmospheres, through an interdisciplinary approach, which includes the integration of state of the art models of the star-planet interaction, atmospheric chemistry and dynamics and planet formation.
The Exoplanets-A has a knowledge server: https://www.explore-exoplanets.eu. It provides scientific and educational resources through two main pages: a Science page and a Learning page.
The science page includes a knowledge base with a direct access to all the scientific products of the project (Archival data, methods and tools, databases and publications).
The Learning page was designed for the public with educational resources based on the science products: Data visualization (exoplanetary system, space instruments, set of data…), online courses (MOOC and SPOC) and serious games (applications in virtual and augmented reality).
During this talk, we would like to present the MOOC on exoplanets that we have developed as well as other outreach resources, such as our augmented reality (AR) application about exoplanets, JWST and the solar system.

Madagascar is a red African island off the southeast coast of Mozambique with Antananarivo, its capital city. Given the country’s involvement in the ongoing African VLBI Network (AVN) and SKA projects, various human capital development initiatives have been implemented. The launch of a postgraduate astrophysics program in 2014 at the Physics Department of the University of Antananarivo and the organization of regular training workshops by the Malagasy.
Astronomy & Space Science (MASS) are among the efforts that have been put in place to train local MSc students have the skills and expertise needed well before the completion of these telescopes. Because most of the advisors and professional astronomers assisting the students live outside the country, a distance supervision approach has been commonly adopted besides the scheduling of skills transfer monthly webinars. So far, more than five students graduated from the MSc programme after which they successfully secured postgraduate scholarships in Astrophysics abroad.
This work reports best practices adopted during a distance supervision while leveraging ICT and online platforms (e.g. remote access, archival data) to ensure a high quality training and student supervision at the University of Antananarivo. We will also discuss the challenges we encountered in past 6 years and the way forward to improve teaching and student engagement in the Astrophysics postgraduate programme.