Crowd Funding Is So Groovy

As I detailed in my introduction, I'm doing crowd funding but with a little twist in that I'm looking for regular, monthly supporters and I'm putting a cap on that support at $2500, or 500 supporters, a month.  Below is part of an interview with a musician that just received 22,000 donations totaling over 1 million dollars.  I have no interest in having that huge level of support, but the idea is the same regardless of dollar amount.

It is a huge feat to convince people you're doing something worthy of that much money.

The way I look at it is this isn’t really so much about me anymore. I’m the one doing it and I’m glad I’m the one doing it. I’m glad I’m not putting this album out on a fucking label, but I’m hoping that I’m just one of many. Hopefully I’m just the first big successful one. The minute someone bigger than me comes along to do this I won’t be jealous, I’ll be ecstatic because I really believe in the philosophy of crowd funding and the philosophy of being directly connected to your fans, business-wise, and being in charge of your own creative destiny instead of letting other people do it. What this is showing people is that the system works. Anybody can do it. I get a lot of criticism for saying that because there are a lot of people saying, "Of course you can do it. You’re Amanda Palmer. You’re famous. You were on a major label." But actually anyone can do it on any level. You just have to apply the rules differently depending where you’re at.

This is taken from a larger article that you can read here.

My Supporters

Here is where I'll keep a list of all my active (black font) and non-active (purple font) supporters:

Mark M

Karla C

Zero Zero Project Update

The goal for yesterday was to, in some way, create a semi-automated method to grab images of individual stars from the SDSS3 survey.  What I came up with is a program that creates an IRAF script that goes out onto the web, grabs a specified full-frame image, and then extracts a small portion (128 pixels by 128 pixels) centered on the object I'm interested in.

IRAF stands for 'Image Reduction and Analysis Facility' and pretty much any astronomer at least knows of IRAF if not relies on it heavily for all kinds of astronomical data reduction and analysis.  I worked in the IRAF programming group for a couple years back in 1998, so I'm still fairly familiar with how it works although it's clear that lots of things are pretty rusty and full of cobwebs.

It looks like from the structure of the SDSS3 that pretty much everything is keyed off of the Object ID number, or 'objId' for short.  The number that is associated with objId is encoded such that it contains information on which image taken with SDSS has the object I'm interested in.  So just from the objId, I could find the original image that a particular object is on.  This information is also contained in the SDSS3 database, so if need be, I can get the info I need from that.

The other thing I did yesterday was to start creating my own local database to store some of the more useful (to me) info that I'll need to complete this project.  For starters, I created a database table that contains the objId, object position in the sky (Right Ascension and Declination), magnitude (for all five filters), and position of the object within a given SDSS3 image.  This will allow my program to access the data it needs easily and quickly.  There's a good chance that sometime soon I'll access the SDSS3 database directly from one of my own programs, but for now this is great.  For the small amount of data I'm working with (9000+ objects isn't all that much considering computer disk capacities these days) it wouldn't matter if I kept all this information in a simple text file rather than a database, but working with databases is very easy and it gives me a lot of flexibility.

So as I said, what this program does is create a 'script' that can then be run in the IRAF environment to extract the images I request.  For those of you who may not know, a 'script' is a list of commands that are executed by the computer sequentially.  So in my case, the script grabs the full-frame image from the SDSS3 and then extracts a small 128x128 pixel "postage stamp" image from that.  I do this for all five wavelengths.  In the end, I have five 128x128 pixel images.  Here they are labeled with their respective color filter designations:

ObjID 127660236032507958, r magnitude 18.53, R SNR 55.27

These are five images of the same object (I just picked a random one) on the same brightness scale.  The signal-to-noise ratio (or SNR) for the 'R' image is about 55, which is more than adequate.  Any SNR above about 10 is acceptable.  The 'Z' image (lower right) is the faintest of them all showing quite a bit of noise.  Yes, the SNR of the 'Z' image is 9.5, which as you can see from the image is still ok (I can still see the star although there's a lot of noise) but is getting questionable.  The measurement errors, for example, will be greater in this image than the other images.

I do what I call a "simple SNR computation" by looking at how much the noise is varying compared to the brightness of the star.  So to use the jargon, I compute the ratio between the maximum value in the image (which will be the brightest pixel in the star) and the 1 sigma standard deviation of the image.  When I divide the two (max value divided by the standard deviation), I get a "good enough" estimate of the SNR.

So now I have a basic tool to extract images from the SDSS3.  Yehaw!  What exactly am I going to do with those images?  Not sure yet, but having the capability at hand will definitely come in handy -- if for no other reason just to take a look and see what I've got!  They say a picture is worth a thousand words and in astronomy that is VERY true.

Eee To Bee Music Project

Here's today's musical exploration.  I've had this sequence in my head for a few days now and I finally got to recording it.  Sorry for the noise -- I'm still learning how to properly record.

I call the song 'Eee To Bee' because that's exactly what the left hand is doing the entire song: E, D, C, B over and over and over and over.  Very cool sound, IMO.

Eee To Bee

Enjoy and I'd love feedback on this continuing project.

A Lesson On Astronomical Magnitudes & Colors

In working through my first astronomy entry, I realized that I needed to remember how astronomical magnitudes work and how to interpret plots like the ones I made.

In astronomy, the brighter the object, the smaller the magnitude value.  So, for example, a star at magnitude 1.0 is brighter than a star at magnitude 2.0.

This also goes for looking at the same star with various color filters.  Mainly because of temperature, stars will appear to be different brightnesses depending on which color filter is being used.

To take a fairly extreme example, White Dwarf Stars are very hot and are therefore brighter at the blue/violet end of the spectrum as compared to the red end of the spectrum.  Say that I measure the magnitude of a White Dwarf star using a blue color filter and got a value of 13.6 -- call this value 'U'.  Then I measure the magnitude of the same star using a red filter and got a value of 14.3 -- call this value 'R'.  The difference in the magnitude --- U minus R --- is -0.7.  This means that that value of R is greater than the value of U -- duh!  But because you have to sort of "think backwards",  the star appears brighter (a smaller magnitude value) in U than is does in R.  This tells me that the star has a pretty high temperature, which is exactly what would be expected from a White Dwarf (surface temps are usually around 30,000 degrees Kelvin).

So in this example from my previous entry:

The more positive the U-R values are, the fainter the stars are using the U color filter (which corresponds to blue/violet).  So in the plot above, you can see that there are actually only a handful of stars that are brighter in the blue than they are in the red (the 'R' filter).

Also, looking at the y-axis, most of the stars have a positive U-R value, which means that they're they're brighter using the very red R filter than they are using the no-so-red U filter.

But as you can see from the plot, there are still quite a few stars that have negative color values.  Some or most of these will likely end up being White Dwarf stars.

So you can see what I'm able to do just by looking at this plot: I can get a general feeling for what kinds of stars I'm dealing with in the small field of view.  There are mostly red or yellow stars and a few blue or white stars.  More details on this to come in the next few days.

First Look at the Data

The first thing I've done today is figure out how to make a general SQL query into the SDSS3 database so I can extract various pieces of information.  My main goal for today was to create a number of color-color diagrams.

So here is the first one.  It's a plot of U-R along the y-axis, and R-Z along the x-axis.  As you recall, Z, R, and U correspond to the stellar magnitude (brightness) of a particular object taken with (in this case) three different color filters.  I've explained the color filters in this blog entry, so I won't go into detail here.

Here is the plot:

Color-Color Diagram R-Z vs U-R (3425 "stars")

Each tiny point on this plot corresponds to a "star" that was detected and cataloged by the SDSS3 pipeline processor.

Here is the corresponding plot showing all detected "galaxies":

Color-Color Diagram R-Z vs U-R (6041 "galaxies")

The first two things that catch my eye is the shape of  the distributions, and all those points that are way outside the main distributions.  The shape will tell me something (TBD) about the population of stars/galaxies I'm working with.  The outlyers, as they're called using the jargon, need to be looked at to see why they're so far out of the norm.  It could be lots of things but most likely I think what I'm going to find is that there was some kind of error in measurement.  But they could also be very interesting stars/galaxies and worth taking a very hard look at.


The other interesting thing I'm seeing at first glace, especially in the stars plot, is the various areas where there seems to be more densely packed stars.  What's that all about?  Further analysis will tell me.

And yes, I'm revising the object count in this project.  There are 3425 detected "stars" and 6041 detected "galaxies".  I'm putting those words in quotes because it's a fact that there will be some (maybe many) false identifications that I'll have to work out. Wow -- that's 9467 objects in this very tiny 1/16th of a square degree field!

Who Are My Supporters?

WHO ARE MY SUPPORTERS?

My supporters are people who are interested in or have a passion for astronomy and/or music and are just as curious as I am about how the universe works and what we can do in it to use our senses to experience how beautiful it all is.

The vast majority of my supporters are people that I will never meet face to face.  They are mostly non-scientists or amateurs or hobbyists.  I'd like to think that professional astronomers and musicians would be interested in my work and would kick in a little from time to time.  My supporters are also friends, or friends of friends, who are interested in the work I'm doing.

My supporters are people who understand that they are giving me a gift with no strings attached and likely to get no "return on investment."  Meaning, they aren't necessarily interested in getting anything in return that will directly and concretely benefit themselves.  Their direct return will be satisfaction and joy in knowing that they are supporting interesting and important work.

WHAT DO SUPPORTERS GET IN RETURN FOR THEIR SUPPORT?

Your support is considered a 'gift'.  If your gift returns anything at all, it should make both of us happy.  YOU will be happy supporting the work of someone who really enjoys what he's doing, and I will be happy because I'm doing the things I want to be doing.  It's a win-win scenario that comes from a place of love.

If there are any kind of tangible returns, here they are:

• I'll provide you with detailed updates on the work I'm doing at least once a day.  This can be in the form of a blog posts, podcasts, tweets on twitter, posts to my facebook page, and videos on YouTube.
• For the astronomy work, you will have full access to the data I collect, process, and create.  I will be publishing my results both on this blog and also submitting articles to various astronomical journals.  A link to the list of my supporters will be in every article I write.
• For the music work, you will have full access to all of the music I cover or create.  I'm be creating some beautiful things which I hope you will enjoy listening to and sharing with others.  The music I create will also be for sale to the general public, with all money from sales going towards capital investments for both the music and astronomy projects.

I'll share everything with you and in so doing you'll be on this journey with me.  A shared experience is a very powerful, synergistic, and beautiful thing.  Come with me.