Dear SETILive

This is our very first newsletter. It's been an amazing few months and we're learning a huge amount about how to build a sensitive signal detection citizen science project. Tonight however there's only this one important story:

Help us test live Follow-Ups in the next 24 hours!
The times are pretty firm, but still are subject to change, so if you want the latest, check setiquest.info....

Please help to make our first live follow-up testing effective and complete by logging in at www.setilive.org... and classifying when you can during the following two upcoming planned "Telescope Active" periods provided in UTC and EDT time zones:

Universal Time Coordinated:
UTC June 15 04:00-05:00 - in about an hour! (June 14, 9-10pm Pacific time)
UTC June 15 13:00-15:00 - tomorrow morning (June 14, 7-9am Pacific)

US Eastern Daylight Time:
EDT Thu June 15, 00:00 - 01:00
EDT Thu June 15, 09:00 - 10:00

We need to have a good number of users classifying while the telescope is active in the coming two days. This will allow us to make sure the full "machinery" at SETILive and the Allen Telescope Array for doing live follow-ups is working properly when it's the "real deal" - responding to users live markings to control the telescope when a potential ET signal is identified. We have follow-ups enabled right now and it's just waiting for the next "Telescope Active" period and enough of the community (that's you) actively classifying signals to start working.

The times are pretty firm, but still are subject to change, so if you want the latest, check setiquest.info....

So, even if you haven't been on for a long time, please try to put in some quality time classifying on SETILive during the next couple days in those time slots.

Thanks very much for your interest in this project. We look forward to seeing lots of you classifying and some real live follow-up events.

What are "Follow-Ups"?

As you may recall, the "live" part of SETILive includes you citizen scientists marking "Live" waterfall images hot off the telescope data stream. The second and most important part of "Live" is "Follow-Ups". This is where if enough of you mark a live signal that has ET potential, the telescope is commanded to interrupt its normal scanning routine, get another new waterfall on that same target and expected frequency, show it to SETILive again to see if it still looks like ET. This will be repeated until it's either shown to have terrestrial characteristics after all, or reaches around five follow-ups in a row and still looks ET. That has never happened and if it ever does, that would of course be a very big deal and that's when it would be handed off to the human operators to to concentrate on tracking and studying it further.

We won't have this full, to-the-limit capability right away, but that will happen shortly after we make sure this basic follow-up function works properly. Also please note that you won't yet be notified if a followup request has been triggered (that's coming soon) but we'll feedback to you all on the success of this next phase on the SETILive blog: blog.setilive.org...

Thanks again for all of your hard work.

Lou and the SETIlive team.