Backyard Worlds: Cool Neighbors: current model tutorial

Welcome to Backyard Worlds: Cool Neighbors! You will be looking through a flipbook - essentially a time lapse movie - of potential brown dwarf candidates. The goal is to find real moving objects like the one shown above!

This is another example of a 'mover.' Look for a small object that's moving from the left to right of the frame. Movers can be any color.

Not all movers will be this obvious! They can easily get lost in noise and may be hard to spot. A real mover will appear to travel in a straight line for at least three frames.

In addition to real movers, there are several types of artifacts that may trick the machine learning algorithm we use into thinking a source is moving when it really isn't. The most common of these artifacts are "ghosts", "diffraction spikes", and "latent artifacts."

This is an example of a ghost artifact. These artifacts are essentially out-of-focus stars which may change in size or appear and disappear throughout the time lapse.

This is a diffraction spike, a line-like artifact which may appear to change in size over time.

This is a latent artifact - the afterglow of a bright star that was previously imaged.

Answer "no" to the question of "is there a mover in this frame?" when you see these.