Abstract:
The Vanishing & Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO) project
investigates astronomical surveys spanning a time interval of 70 years, searching for unusual and
exotic transients. We present herein the VASCO Citizen Science Project, which can identify unusual
candidates driven by three different approaches: hypothesis, exploratory, and machine learning,
which is particularly useful for SETI searches. To address the big data challenge, VASCO combines
three methods: the Virtual Observatory, user-aided machine learning, and visual inspection through
citizen science. Here we demonstrate the citizen science project and its improved candidate selection
process, and we give a progress report. We also present the VASCO citizen science network led by
amateur astronomy associations mainly located in Algeria, Cameroon, and Nigeria. At the moment
of writing, the citizen science project has carefully examined 15,593 candidate image pairs in the data (ca. 10% of the candidates), and has so far identified 798 objects classified as “vanished”. The
most interesting candidates will be followed up with optical and infrared imaging, together with the
observations by the most potent radio telescopes.
