Astronomy Photographer of the Year (plus complimentary digital astronomy services)

The Royal Observatory, Greenwich (ROG) recently launched a suite of digital astronomy services, now brought together through a new annual competition and exhibition, Astronomy Photographer of the Year. The projects are a work-in-progress but they demonstrate innovative approaches to content – and potential for future development. Of particular interest is:

Digital outreach on Flickr
From the beginning, we knew that we could extend the exhibition experience– and broaden participation – by using Flickr to collect entries. Astronomy Photographer of the Year has a home on our website, but also a home-from-home – our Flickr Group.

Our own website uses the Flickr API to pull though pictures so participants can enter their top five photos into the competition – this is where we're picky about rules and how many photos people enter. But in the group we can be more relaxed. Participants can add more photos than they want to enter in the competition – or choose not to enter at all. And our Group will stay open from year to year, so come 2009's competition closing date we don't have to say goodbye to a bunch of people we've just said hello to.

Astrotagging
Selecting Flickr immediately got us to ask, what would be the space equivalent of geotagging? Answer: astrotagging! But working out where you are in space is much trickier than putting a pin in a map – the added dimensions of depth and movement mean it's not immediately user-friendly. Eventually, we came up with a 'some-human, some-robot' approach.

We worked with the scientists at Astrometry.net, who built us a robot to go through all pictures shared in our group. The robot identifies the objects in the picture – and the space equivalents of latitude, longitude, scale and photo orientation – using the geometry of the stars. It then automatically adds this info to pictures as machine tags. That way, real people only have to machine-tag their pictures with a full GMT date and timestamp, and the main subject of their photo. This approach means the 'bot does the tricky bit, but humans pick up the things the 'bot can't do – like labelling moving things such as planets and comets.

Together the tags add huge science education potential and enable web developers to make things, which we've encouraged. We're aiming to montage pictures together and create a zoom function for display in the exhibition opening in September 2009, but will be excited to see what others come up with. We're also hoping that astrotagging will become an accepted and widely-used standard for describing astrophotography and to help we've produced guides: Astrotags explained, The science of astrotags, Astrotagging for developers and How the Astrometry.net robot works.

Talk to the judges and our astronomers on Flickr – or via our Skype phone line
Participants can talk to the ROG's astronomers and judges – and among themselves – on Flickr, making the group an online community of practice for amateur astronomers and astrophotography enthusiasts. It's early days but Marek, our Public Astronomer and a judge on the competition, is there, as is our technical lead on the project, Jim. All this activity is pulled straight through to our website using Flickr's rss feeds.

We also have an astronomy podcast, which gets real voices 'on the line' via a Skype answering service. We take the best recorded questions, convert them to mp3 and assemble them into a monthly podcast, transcribed by CastingWords.com.

Prime Sky – photo opportunity alerts by SMS
Prime Sky is our guide to the night skies above Britain. Each day it points casual astronomers towards the most interesting objects or events: star clusters, eclipses, comets, lunar phases and planetary movements. It can be browsed online, or from a mobile phone, and participants can sign up to get a text alert for each of this year's big 10 astronomical events. (Prime Sky also has a public API and web feeds in various formats.)

Most of it was done with little or no money
The Astronomy Photographer of the Year project was delivered with no budget – just using in-house expertise, our existing platforms and by partnering with smart and generous people, especially our new friends at Astrometry.net.

This is not a standalone micro-site with a limited shelf life. We've taken a 'small pieces loosely joined' approach to development, creating focused services that do one thing really well, and then bringing them together around the subject of astrophotography, using APIs, web feeds and links. Such an approach should allow us to flexibly respond to new opportunities as the competition and exhibition develops from year to year. But of most interest to us is how other people use the Flickr and Prime Sky APIs, and our astrotagging standard, to create their own stuff.

Historical context
The ROG's historic South Wing – where the Astronomy Photographer of the Year exhibition will be held – was built for astro-photographic work, under the guidance of Astronomer Royal Sir William Christie. Christie transformed the role of the Observatory through a project called Carte du Ciel, which brought together observatories from around the world to produce a photographic map of the entire sky. To us, Astronomy Photographer of the Year has those same aspirations and enables us to make meaningful connections between our history and contemporary science.