The Solar Physics Group at Trinity College Dublin, in collaboration with the Citizen Science Alliance, has just launched a new citizen science project, Sunspotter.org, that is designed to provide the solar physics community with a sunspot-group dataset ranked in terms of complexity. Currently, Sunspotter is in the citizen science stage, whereby the public can log onto www.sunspotter.org and determine which sunspot group in a pair of images is the more complex one. Soon we will be able to analyse all of these classifications and publish a relative measure of sunspot complexity. This will help to establish the true relationship between sunspot group complexity and flares, which has been discussed in the community for many decades.
In addition to the public, we welcome participation from scientists and educators:
Discuss: talk.sunspotter.org
Blog: blog.sunspotter.org
Twitter: twitter.com/sunspotter_org
Materials for educators are available here www.sunspotter.org/#/education
Dr. Paul A Higgins (lead scientist on Sunspotter) – pohuigin@gmail.com
Prof. Peter T. Gallagher – peter.gallagher@tcd.ie