The Global Sky Partners program is the premier educational project offered by Las Cumbres Observatory, where 1,000+ hours of telescope time is donated to schools around the world. The Global Sky Partners are a diverse group of educators and scientists who run their own fully-supported education projects and investigations using our telescopes. Students who participate in the Global Sky Partners are enthusiastic about their work and come to an understanding of and love for scientific research.
Recently, two members of the Global Sky Partners have won international recognition.
Michèle Gerbaldi is a leader of the Astrolab project, which provides telescope time and training to university students in sub-Saharan Africa. The project introduces the students to the scientific method and sparks interest in the STEM fields. One student in Kenya used LCO data for his senior thesis on eclipsing binary stars.
In January of this year, Dr. Gerbaldi was awarded the Chevalier of the National Order of Merit by the Institute d’Astrophysique de Paris. The National Order of Merit was given in recognition of her 39 years of service as a volunteer astrophysicist with astronomy organizations. Please read the announcement here.
The discovery image that the Kilonova Seekers volunteers first saw of GOTO0650 when it went into outburst. The science (left), reference (center), and difference (right) images are shown. The very bright star in both the science and difference images is the object itself - it brightened by about a factor 2500x.
Image Credit: GOTO, T. Killestein
The University of Warwick in the UK leads the Global Sky Partners project Kilonova Seekers. The Kilonova Seekers is a citizen science project that has recently made its first major discovery of an exploding star. The discovery of the cataclysmic variable star named GOTO0650 was published on July 1 in Astronomy & Astrophysics. The University of Warwick has announced the discovery on its website.
The LCO Director of Education, Dr. Edward Gomez, is pleased with the success of the project, "The unique opportunity provided by our Global Sky Partners program demonstrates the power of LCO to contribute to citizen science campaigns in an unprecedented way. Through these partnerships we give people who would never have this type of experience, the ability to contribute to genuine science".
