today's cheerful thing: citizen science

The link to an NPR article on Newly Discovered Auroral Form has been doing the rounds (with an especial hat-tip to redbird, who provided the version I finally mustered the executive function to click on), and includes an onward link to the publication itself (open access), which I have been finding just charming. Five of the 13 authors have their affiliation listed (in the PDF) as "Citizen Scientist, Finland", which is exactly right and proper and as it should be and has been giving me warm fuzzies all day.

I just. The sheer delight:

On 7 October 2018, the auroral watchers spotted the dunes again, this time marking the start of a detective story uncovering the physics the dunes represent. We organized an ad hoc campaign in the evening of 7 October 2018, where the scientists and the citizen observers from different parts of Finland were in real‐time connection. As a result, we gained several consecutive and simultaneous pictures with calibrated camera clocks throughout Finland. These pictures, presented in this paper, formed the backbone of this study.