Launching the VASCO citizen science project by Beatriz Villarroel et al. on Wednesday 23 November

The Vanishing \& Appearing Sources during a Century of Observations (VASCO)

project investigates astronomical surveys spanning a 70 years time interval,

searching for unusual and exotic transients. We present herein the VASCO

Citizen Science Project, that uses three different approaches to the

identification of unusual transients in a given set of candidates:

hypothesis-driven, exploratory-driven and machine learning-driven (which is of

particular benefit for SETI searches). To address the big data challenge, VASCO

combines methods from the Virtual Observatory, a user-aided machine learning

and visual inspection through citizen science. In this article, we demonstrate

the citizen science project, the new and improved candidate selection process

and 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 12,000 candidate image pairs in the data, and has so far identified

713 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.

arXiv: http://arxiv.org/abs/http://arxiv.org/abs/2009.10813v3