Take two students from MIT; now, take two students from MIT with only $150 in their pockets and a notion to use a little science to make a little art, and what do you get? ... Eight gigabytes of near-space photographs and an experience to share to the rest of the world of citizen scientists!

Oliver Yeh, Justin Lee, and Eric Newton set out to take some amazing pictures, and they didn't have much cash to get the job done. So, with a lot of ingenuity, a little scrounging around the dorm room, they were able to create a secure -- and legal -- launch vehicle that contained a used Canon A470 camera and sent it up 17 1/2 miles to take some excellent images capturing the curvature of the Earth. With a lot of luck, and little help from an GPS-enabled pre-paid cell phone for tracking, they found their vehicle (a Styrofoam container with a couple of hand warmers inside!) only 20 miles away from the launch site.

The group plans to post a detailed instruction guide on how they accomplished the launch, and will be providing the information free of charge. We will be sure to link to the instructions from DPR, and maybe we'll be seeing in the near future more balloons flying high from citizen scientists around the world.

Several days ago, we featured the NYC Cricket Crawl citizen science project sponsored by the Discover Live organization ... and with a little rain delay from last night, tonight is now the night for event!

The exciting part for everyone not living in the greater New York City area (although, it certainly is a large area!), is that we can watch the results coming in live. So, check out all of the chirping action, and watch the latest in citizen science produce real results for real research!

Citizen Science activities certainly don't have to cost a lot of money, and most of the projects we discuss here at DPR are essentially "free" to perform... but this project... now, this project does cost some money. But, it's pretty darn awesome. And, following this line of extreme citizen science would be more tuned for a lager group or team who can contribute more financial assistance and expertise.

This is the ultimate model rocket launch, performed by the professional NASA astrophysicist by day and citizen scientist by night, Dr. Alex Antunes. Here, he is merging science with music with the plan to build an ionospheric detector with a device to convert the input signals to a MIDI stream that can be picked up by HAM radios. We'll be able to "listen" to low-orbital space music for as long as the little satellite can survive.

Like I said... pretty, cool, right?

Follow the project on the blogs listed below, and wish the team great luck for a successful launch in 2010!

A once-in-a-lifetime opportunity in citizen science was certainly not on the minds of 6-year-old Alyson Yates and her mom, Kate, when they stepped out into their back yard one day to scout for ladybugs. But, their effort that day lead to a critical discovery that the Lost Ladybug Project from Cornell University had been long awaiting.

What the Yates found was the elusive nine-spotted ladybug, likely to have been overtaken in the United States by the Asian seven-spotted bugs imported in the 1970s and 80s to assist with crop pest control.

Now these little red fairytale creatures are living the high-life in Ithaca and breeding like wildfire. The hope is that the researchers will discover the true cause of the drastic decline of our classic native ladybug, and what might be a way to bring them back to our backyards.

Read more about this great success story of citizen science, and find our more about how you can participate in the Lost Ladybug Project...

Scientists from the University of Montana and the University of Calgary reported in 2007 on their use of local citizens to monitor and record observations of wildlife crossings of Highway 3 in southwestern Alberta, Canada. The data is being used to better understand wildlife movement in the area and how a planned highway improvement project might impact the environment.

This is a wonderfully useful approach for data collection in order to provide a potentially more broader look at a long-term natural pattern. What is particularly interesting about this report, however, is that is does address what will ultimately be the most critical issue for citizen science programs to overcome: how to guarantee that data collected from unregulated and potentially biased and subjective observers can be filtered into a set of data that can be considered scientific.

Citizen science data may never be considered as "real science" unless biases and unintentional errors can be monitored or filtered out. As long as the data collection sets are sufficiently large, then statistical analysis against a known, accurate sub-set of data can be used. Of course, once statistics is brought into the picture, then some generalizations are typically required, which can lessen the viability of the data.

I do believe that this is "legitimacy issue" is fundamental, and must be addressed by program leaders in the crowdsourcing citizen science projects.

This summer, two recent graduates of Trinity School in Manhattan conducted an impressive research program of amateur science that might send food critics and restaurateurs rolling through the streets of New York City.

And, if you happened to click on the school's link above you will notice that we're talking about high school students!

Using a recently developed technique called DNA bar coding, a species can be identified by looking at a single gene without the need to sequence the entire genome. So, Kate Stoeckle and Louisa Strauss went out into the city and ate a lot of sushi and preserved a bit of each sample to send off to a lab for testing. At the University of Guelph in Ontario, a graduate student who works in the "Fish Bar Code of Life" project completed the genetic analysis and compared the results to the thousands of fish species already identified in their database.

Read more about how the two young citizen scientists became interested in sushi ID'ing and what they discovered...

The local Audubon Society of Forsyth County in North Carolina has been successfully active since 1973, and if you live in the area you should consider joining the chapter. With citizen science programs and surveys sponsored throughout the year, the chapter also holds monthly "public bird walks," which would be a wonderful opportunity for enthusiasts to learn more about the natural habitats in the county.

They also take part in the National Audubon Society's Important Bird Area with their "adoptions" of Hanging Rock and New River State Parks.

Two new wildflower plant species of the phlox family (more) have been discovered in the Lime Ridge Open Space at the foot of Mt. Diablo in central California. The two species are named Lime Ridge Navarretia (Navarretia gowenii) and Lime Ridge Woollystar (Eriastrum sp. nov.).

[ VIEW MORE IMAGES ]

The discoverer of the plants is amateur botanist, David Gowen, who is a testament to the reality that we still have much to learn about our world--and we often don't have to look much further than our back yard.

The media release from the Save Mount Diablo organization is a thorough review of the entire discovery process and is an exciting reminder of what real contributions citizen scientists provide.

Also featured by the Society of Amateur Scientists...

DPRI wants to know about your amateur research activities! As more people see what exciting and interesting things citizen scientist do, then more will be inspired to join in developing a deeper appreciation for our universe.

Please post brief reports of your work--from small-scale backyard discoveries with your family to nation-wide collaborations--as COMMENTS below and inspire the next generation of citizen scientists!

Congratulations to Steve Mandel of Soquel, California who won the 2008 Amateur Achievement Award from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific! Starting his project in 2004, Steve worked to catalog images of nebulae in the Milky Way. A significant experimental discovery was that small-aperture telescopes with CCD cameras--something available to any amateur astronomer--is a perfect recording device to detect large nebular clouds high above the galactic plane.

[Learn more about the Mandel-Wilson Unexplored Nebulae Project]

[ READ more about the ASP 2008 Awards ]

As featured on BBC News - Science/Nature and found by DPRI via Astronomy Blog, check out how an amateur astronomer discovered a new electrical storm on Saturn.

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