Come On! Impacting Asteroids (COIAS) project<\/a>, an app which allows people to look through archival telescope data in search of not-yet identified objects in space.<\/p>\n\u201cI probably spend like an hour or two every night just on this project. It kind of helps me chill out at the end of the day. It\u2019s a good way to wind down,\u201d he said. \u201cYou\u2019re kind of looking for little objects that move against the background of the stars. All the stars will stay perfectly still, galaxies stay still \u2014 they\u2019re all very beautiful \u2014 and these little asteroids will just move across the screen. They kind of move in like a linear way, kind of worming their way along the sky.\u201d<\/p>\n
Leilani, which has officially named in April, was the first unknown asteroid Fisher has come across since he started looking
\nin 2023.<\/p>\n
\u201cUsually, they turn out to be known asteroids, so I was thrilled that this one was brand new,\u201d he said. \u201cIt only happens occasionally, but the Subaru (telescope) data is really rich with a lot of unknown asteroids, so almost anybody could start working on it and find something new.\u201d<\/p>\n
Fisher said he not only finds citizen science projects like COIAS fun, but also feels they play a valuable role in advancing scientific knowledge.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve done a lot of projects in the past. For me, it\u2019s a way to kind of just chill out and relax because my mind races, and I like to have an activity that helps me focus,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it helps a lot of researchers get a lot of important stuff done.\u201d<\/p>\n
He said he encourages anyone who may be interested to give citizen astronomy a shot.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe human mind is great at picking up patterns and pattern recognition, so almost anybody could do this. It just comes naturally to you,\u201d he said. \u201cThere\u2019s a great little walk-through they have on their website, on the Come On! Impacting Asteroids website. They have a YouTube walk-through that shows you how to do everything.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s an asteroid, millions of miles away from Earth, that now shares a connection with Hawaii island. Dubbed…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":784998,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[6813,79,193],"class_list":["post-784997","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-editors","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784997","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=784997"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/784997\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/784998"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=784997"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=784997"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=784997"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}