SuperWASP Blog
VeSPA in Research Notes of the AAS
14 October 2021, by Adam McMaster in Variable Stars
Research Notes of the AAS has just published our short write up of VeSPA and our first data release. Here’s the abstract:
We present the first results from the SuperWASP Variable Stars (SVS) citizen science project. The photometry archive of the Wide Angle Search for Planets has previously been searched for periodic variations and the results of this search formed the basis of the SVS project on the Zooniverse. The SVS project asks volunteers to visually inspect light curve plots and categorize each one according to a broad classification scheme. Results from the first two years of SVS have now been published online as the SuperWASP Variable Star Photometry Archive (VeSPA). The archive can be browsed online, downloaded in full, or queried, filtered, and sorted to export a refined set of results. An interactive light curve viewer also allows any light curve to be folded at a user-defined period. Analysis of citizen science results and development of VeSPA features are both ongoing. Updated results will be published every six months.
I hope this will help other astronomers to find and use our data in their own work, as well as giving them a way to cite VeSPA in any work they publish. (Our Zenodo DOIs allow researchers to cite the individual data releases, but this now gives people a way to cite VeSPA itself.)
Acknowledgements
The SuperWASP project is currently funded and operated by Warwick University and Keele University, and was originally set up by Queen’s University Belfast, the Universities of Keele, St. Andrews and Leicester, the Open University, the Isaac Newton Group, the Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias, the South African Astronomical Observatory and by STFC.
The Zooniverse project on SuperWASP Variable Stars is led by Andrew Norton (The Open University) and builds on work he has done with his former postgraduate students Les Thomas, Stan Payne, Marcus Lohr, Paul Greer, and Heidi Thiemann, and current postgraduate student Adam McMaster.
The Zooniverse project on SuperWASP Variable Stars was developed with the help of the ASTERICS Horizon2020 project. ASTERICS is supported by the European Commission Framework Programme Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation action under grant agreement n.653477
VeSPA was designed and developed by Adam McMaster as part of his postgraduate work. This work is funded by STFC, DISCnet, and the Open University Space SRA. Server infrastructure was funded by the Open University Space SRA.