Learning Space Ep. 15: Space App Challenge
Channel: astrospherevids
Date: 02/05/2013

This week we talk with Jonathan Roberts about the Space App Hackathon and his winning entry from the New York region. We go on to explore Hackathons in general and his wonderfully geeky side job. 

Space App Challenge: http://spaceappschallenge.org/
SpaceCal App: http://spacecalnyc.com/
Intro video for SpaceCalNYC: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ACQqKDbQMQ
(Voting for the international challenge starts this week!)
NYC Big Apps: http://nycbigapps.com/
"Brian Cox Builds a Cloud Chamber" (via Guido Bibra): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWxfliNAI3U
Lands of Ice and Fire: http://www.amazon.com/The-Lands-Fire-Game-Thrones/dp/0345538544

Jon's bio:
"I'm a postdoc physicist at NYU, researching the origin of cosmic rays. I used to make predictions for how we would find dark matter at the Large Hadron Collider when I was a postdoc over in Warsaw. I've been doing more and more data visualisation recently after getting frustrated with how hard it is to get a feeling for lots of science data.

I went along to the NASA space apps challenge and was amazed by the number of people willing to put their time in to create tools to open up access to science results. I spent 36 hours coding with people I'd only just met, had a great time, and created a functioning tool that's useful for scientists and the public. I was pretty amazed.

We created a site that aggregates data on what telescopes are looking at, and when they're looking. The site plots the observations on the sky so you can see not only where the telescope is looking, but click to find out more, and explore historical images of the target - whether it's a distant galaxy or a supernova remnant in our own Milky Way. You can filter by date, or by target, and you can export the data as plain text - making it useful for scientists as well as the public. And there's a twitter account that will tweet to you when telescopes turn to look at new targets, so you can get tweets from space!

Oh, and I also draw maps professionally..."