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January 12, 2009
Astronomers Use Google Sky to Raise Research Funds
This is a cool way to raise money for your research projects. Borrowing on the old idea of selling stars to make money, the Kepler Asteroseismic Science Consortium (KASC), which is a large international collaboration of scientists, has created the non-profit Pale Blue Dot Project. The idea is that people can peruse their database of stars 
which might have planets, and pay $10 to adopt that star. Copy the number for the star you select and go to the site to make your donation. The $10 will go directly to help pay for research to have the Kepler satellite search that star for planets. What a brilliant idea!
Thanks to GEB reader Mark Petersen for the tip.
Posted by FrankTaylor at January 12, 2009 8:14 AM
Comments
Posted by: Sjors Provoost at February 21, 2009 3:31 AM
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I started a simple ruby on rails application around this project, to make it easier to adopt a star.
This project is not in any way associated with Pale Blue Dot; it's just me. But who knows that might change.
At the moment, it doesn't do anything useful except show a list of stars. Here's a list of possible improvements (for
which I don't have time, so patches are welcome):
* search by other criteria, e.g.
** range of brightness (http://www.spaceacademy.net.au/library/notes/magntude.htm)
** not adopted yet
** region
* google sky mashup
* Facebook / Etc integration, e.g.
** show your friend's stars on map
** find a bright star near your friends
* search for cool astronomic coincidences, e.g.
** eclipsed by Jupiter on your birthday
* etc, etc
It's not live yet, but here's the source code:
http://github.com/Sjors/pale-blue-dot/tree/master