An astronomical presentation to a conference in Seattle seems an odd starting point for a blog post on social media. I was, at first, slightly underwhelmed by the image of the whole of our night sky shown on BBC Breakfast this morning. Apparently, it would require half a million digital TVs to display in detail, so we had to make do with the composite overview.
But I was soon blown away by the data it encapsulated which has:
- already been studied for ten years
- given rise to the discovery of around half a billion new stars and galaxies
- been collated from seven million individual images each comprising 125 million pixels.
These kind of numbers are like the neural connections in our brains … or the number of pointless tweets posted each day!
What I find really exciting though, is that new technology and social media have made the world of science accessible to ‘ordinary people’. There is simply too much data in the composite image for the scientific community to unpick. So, thanks to Open Source technology, the image is freely available to us all to view and interrogate – or just marvel at on YouTube. The academic community has opened the door to contributions from ‘citizen scientists’ who can discover new stars and galaxies through a virtual study of the night sky. The media world has already opened up to citizen journalists and now science is following suit.
I started my ‘social media learning journey’ with some scepticism last November, but the further I go, the more of a convert I become. We all say we suffer from data overload yet it opens amazing new worlds – or even galaxies – for us!
Posted by corinne150pr 
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