Suggested Comet Hunters Talk Hashtags

After classifying the asteroid image in the main interface, you’re presented with an option to discuss the image you’ve seen in Comet Hunters Talk, if you hit the ‘Talk’ button.

Comet Hunters Talk is a place where you can discuss the images with other volunteers and with the science team. You can also label then image you’ve classified with descriptive hashtags like #tail.

Thanks to our Talk moderators, we now have a list of preferred hashtags (see below) we’d like suggest you use on Talk to help flag images in ways above and beyond what we can learn from the classification interface and the questions we ask you there.

We aim to also do a search using these preferred hashtags later on in the year to search for comet candidates and identify false positives.

#tail – see a very clear and definite tail. Currently many people use this for any sign of a tail, but we’d like you to use this for anything you’re very sure of it. If you think there’s any chance it might a faint background star or galaxy then use the #possible tag. (example)

#possible – maybe has a tail, but not sure if it’s real or if it could be an overlap with a found background star or galaxy (example)

#overlap – asteroid is overlapping another star or galaxy (example)

#elongated – asteroid appears to be elongated/elliptical compared to the reference stars (example)

#offcentercandidate – you see a tail but it’s on a source not in the center of the crosshairs

#nearbyobject – where there is an asteroid visible in the center of the crosshairs,  but there is a  nearby  detached faint object that’s not a tail (example)

#badrefstars – one or both of the reference stars are bad (looks like a galaxy or isn’t visible) or it’s hard to see one or both of the reference stars (example, example)

#poorimage – the asteroid image is of bad image (example)

These are suggestions. Talk enables flexible labeling, so if you don’t find any hashtags from the list above that matches what you see, definitely create a new one!