Thank you.
On behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, I would like to thank you for the opportunity to speak to you here today.
I am a retired police detective and military officer who, in the 10th year of his life, got a telescope. I now have 58 years of observing experience. I'm the national president of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada, which has been around for 154 years, has 5,200 members across the continent and has 30 centres.
I am a citizen scientist. I work with the Galaxy Zoo project, which is part of the larger Zooniverse citizen science project, helping to classify galaxies identified in sky surveys.
I'm the founder and lead of the RASC's world asterisms project, which is an ethnoastronomical reconciliation project gathering the sky cultures of the people of the world. So far, we've examined 572 cultures and gathered over 11,000 asterisms. We're only 20 months old, so we're doing pretty well.
I'm a member of Astronomers Without Borders and work with ethnoastronomers and archeoastronomers around the world on projects.
Dr. Mona Nemer, when testifying the other day, mentioned that citizen scientists are not just helping hands but also great sources of ideas for projects. I want to reinforce this. If you want to solve a problem or if you want to do an investigation, you need to get as many perspectives into the conversation and the investigation as you can. You need people from different educational, cultural and social backgrounds, because it's one of those unique perspectives that's going to give you the breakthrough that will speed things up. Citizen scientists are a great source for those perspectives.
There is a bottleneck in astronomy. Only about 10% to 20% of the astrophysicists who apply for time on the big telescopes get it. There are not enough telescopes. There are times when all of those observatories are socked in. We are the people who get the data when that happens.
Most astrophysicists don't go anywhere near an eyepiece. Technicians at the big observatories get the data they need. We spend our lives at the eyepiece. We are able to get the light curves to confirm exoplanets and exomoons transiting stars and to monitor variable stars to see if they are about to go supernova. We monitor the spectroscopy when they go supernova to figure out what kinds of elements are being created. We search off the plane of the galaxy, where there's no funding, to search for comets, for near-Earth objects that may be a hazard or for supernovas.
We get light quality readings to assist my two colleagues here, who are interested in how they affect the migration of birds. We track meteorites. We hunt them down and dig them up. In the Juno mission to Jupiter, most of those images you see are now processed by amateur astrophotographers. NASA made a decision to do that. I'm pretty sure they don't regret having done that.
We bring accurate information back to our communities and train the next generation of citizen scientists.
Dr. Rémi Quirion, when he was testifying the other day, mentioned his concerns regarding misinformation on social media. Notable science educator Neil deGrasse Tyson, in a recent radio interview, was saying there has been a failure in education because we're teaching people to memorize facts instead of teaching them how to think. The problem with that is, if the source of the facts is unreliable, you get problems.
We go out into the communities and we show them how to investigate their surroundings. I am still a detective, but now I investigate the universe.
I'd be happy to answer any questions you have for us today.