Seti@home & Milkyway@home Project

After a recent Trip to the Arecibo Radio Telescope I thought I’d share a Project that you can be a part of to help the SETI Project.

If your into astronomy but don’t have time for public outreach there is one great and interesting way to help. Berkeley has created a computation program that uses your computer power to process data. Two great projects are the Seti@home project and the Milkyway@home Project.

The Seti@home project takes packets of data from the Arecibo Radio Telescope and uses your computer to process and translate the data. Once completed the data is sent back to be analyzed for signals. If a signal is discovered it is confirmed among other Radio Telescopes. The person(s) who found the signal with their screen saver would be named as one of the co-discoverers along with the others on the SETI@home team.

UPDATE: 3/6/2020

SETI@home hibernation
On March 31, the volunteer computing part of SETI@home will stop distributing work and will go into hibernation.

We're doing this for two reasons:

1) Scientifically, we're at the point of diminishing returns; basically, we've analyzed all the data we need for now.

2) It's a lot of work for us to manage the distributed processing of data. We need to focus on completing the back-end analysis of the results we already have, and writing this up in a scientific journal paper.

However, SETI@home is not disappearing. The web site and the message boards will continue to operate. We hope that other UC Berkeley astronomers will find uses for the huge computing capabilities of SETI@home for SETI or related areas like cosmology and pulsar research. If this happens, SETI@home will start distributing work again. We'll keep you posted about this.

Milkyway@Home uses the BOINC platform to harness volunteered computing resources, creating a highly accurate three dimensional model of the Milky Way galaxy using data gathered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This project enables research in both astroinformatics and computer science.

The way to get Boinc is to download the files here: BOINC

Please join the Team theastrogazer if you decide to join either of the projects.