The stars are at your fingertips (tdf2026)

Humans have gazed at the stars since the dawn of civilization, but we've never had an opportunity quite like the one we have today. Johannes Kepler had to travel to Prague (and by some accounts practically steal) to get his hands on the astronomical data he needed to discover the laws of planetary motion. Today, you can download data from the world's most powerful space missions in minutes, from your own home. Modern astrophysics is a data science, and almost all of the data professional scientists use daily is freely available online, for everyone. There are really only a handful of types to get to grips with: images, light curves, spectra, photometry, gravitational waves, and multi-messenger observations. These come in simple formats, often just tables like a spreadsheet, that you can explore with Excel or a couple of lines of Python. The analysis tools scientists use are open source too. In this talk I want to convince you that the barrier to entry is much lower than you think. I'll walk you through what kinds of data exist, what you can discover with them, and how to take your first steps, including platforms like Zooniverse, where citizen scientists are already contributing to real discoveries. The universe's data is for you too. Licensed to the public under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ about this event: https://cfp.cttue.de/tdf5/talk/UFDA8L/