Backyard Worlds: Planet Nine has been a model of success since 2017. It boasts 18 peer-reviewed publications co-authored with dozens of project participants - that’s more publications than any other NASA sponsored citizen science project. The same team built a second project, Backyard Worlds: Cool Neighbors, building on these wins. 

Instrumental to the success of the Backyard Worlds projects are the weekly video conference calls, which effectively include dozens of volunteers as active members of the science team. As the project team looks to grow further, they are asking two important questions: 

1) How do we provide volunteers with faster feedback? And

2) What explains the dearth of women among our advanced users, and what might be done to engage a more gender-balanced participant community?

Join us to hear more about the Backyard Worlds: Planet Nine project, its practices, and join a conversation addressing the team’s pressing questions. We will have with us four Backyard Worlds team members: founder Marc Kuchner, US Naval Observatory principal investigator Adam Schneider, and two of its many passionate volunteers. Leopold Gramaize, who recently became a co-Investigator on a James Webb Space Telescope observation award to follow up on a Backyard Worlds candidate, and Farid Cedeno, a co-author of a pending publication on the Wide-field Retrieval of Astrodata Program (WRAP), a tool created to help astronomers in gathering photometric and astrometric data for very faint or hard to track point sources. 

This recording includes the discussion that followed, including comments by our two invited respondents, Dr. Stella Kafka and Dr. Patricia Knezek.