Adam McMaster

The SuperWASP Variable Stars project on the Zooniverse asks citizen science volunteers to classify light curves in order to identify candidate variable stars. Volunteers are presented with folded lightcurve plots, generated from archive data collected by the SuperWASP exoplanet search. The volunteers classify each plot by its shape, choosing one of: pulsator; EA/EB (detached eclipsing binaries); EW (contact eclipsing binaries); rotator; unknown (miscellaneous periodic shapes); or junk (no periodic shape). In its first two years, the project received 1 million volunteer classifications from 4,500 users. We are now preparing the first release of aggregated classifications from the project, containing 148,522 candidate variable stars. This will be published online via an open-access website called VeSPA: The SuperWASP Variable Star Photometry Archive. VeSPA will allow volunteers to interactively explore and download the results of the project, as well as providing a catalogue of variable star candidates for professional astronomers to use. Users will be able to look up objects by ID and perform cone searches, and filter on parameters such as variable star type, period length, and magnitude. Results will be available to download in CSV format, and raw (unfolded) photometric data will be available in FITS format.