GOTO collaborators Tom Killestein and Lisa Kelsey oversaw the launch at the UK NAM this week of a wonderful new citizen-science initative, Kilonova Seekers. The project provides candidate transients from GOTO and asks users to play "spot the difference" in distingushing genuine transients (or source variability) from various kinds of artifacts that crop up in our differencing procedure. Tom & Lisa had previously set up a platform for use within the collaboration to help vet our templates used for subtraction, but this new effort draws in a much wider pool of potential helpers to contribute directly to the highest-priority science, identifying kilonovae in our transient stream. By the end of the week we'd already had more than 100k classifications by 650 volunteers, an incredible success! The launch was followed by a release from Monash's press office and Lisa was also interviewed on BBC's Radio Solent. The input from this program will soon be directly integrated into our internal tools for identifying high-priority transients for followup.

Labels: 2023, outreach