Latest Update (August 9, 2023)
We are no longer organizing the workshop for the time being. If you are interested in our previous work, we encourage you to join the Slack workspace for NASA’s Exoplanet Watch program, where you can meet and get support from professional astronomers as well as educators and students.
You can find our previously published papers here.
The Workshop
The Exoplanet Research Workshop is a group-run project intended to bring the astronomy research seminar experience to a larger population of pre-college students across the globe. Workshop participants contribute research findings to NASA’s Exoplanet Watch, a citizen science initiative.
We’ve shared our workshop experiences and citizen science research with the larger space science, citizen science, and science education community at conferences including the AAVSO Annual Meeting, the Global Hands-On Universe Conference (recording here), and the AGU Fall Meeting. We will later be conducting a meta-study on this workshop and our cumulative findings.
Getting Involved
For those who are just getting started with contributing to Exoplanet Watch, we’ve posted resources in Getting Started. We’ve posted several of our meeting recordings and slides in case you would like to review them.
In our workshop iterations, we first hold large weekly group meetings in Zoom and later switch over to smaller group meetings for individual teams to focus on their research.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: How do I participate?
A: We’re glad you’re interested! Follow the instructions at the top of the page here to get started.
Q: Do I need any experience?
A: Nope! We’ll provide you with all the resources you need.
Q: What kinds of papers are written in this workshop?
A: We expect the papers from this workshop to be about analyzing transits of Qatar-1b, but we welcome you to examine related topics if you would like. See our Papers page for more information.
Q: What is the expected time commitment?
A: You get to decide: you have the option of either writing a paper with a team or just analyzing transits to contribute to our larger meta-study. The timeline for writing the paper is flexible.
Q: Why am I running into EXOTIC errors?
A: Please ask in our Slack workspace (or the main Exoplanet Watch workspace, which you’ll be added to after we approve you to participate.)
Feel free to contact us through Slack or email if you have any more questions. We look forward to working with you!