How big is the Galaxy Zoo collaboration now?
Every once in a while, usually at the summer AAS meeting, the Zookeepers like to play a game called “How big is our collaboration now?” Last time, it was inspired by Chris and I attending a baseball game in St. Louis, and realizing that there were enough Galaxy Zoo volunteers to fill the stadium three times over. That led us into a discussion of “what else are we bigger than”?
Today, the Galaxy Zoo collaboration has 230,000 volunteers. How does that compare?
In terms of baseball, here is how we stack up against my home team’s stadium, Camden Yards in Baltimore (photo courtesy of Flickr user Kevin Farner, click for a larger image):
What about compared to other major milestones? Here is our list of things we are bigger than:
- Portsmouth and my hometown of Orlando
- The British Army
- The number of Quakers in North and South America
- The U.S. Libertarian Party
- …and 48 American Astronomical Societies!
Can you think of other places or organizations that we are bigger than?
Galaxy Zoo 
Galaxy Zoo has more collaborators than McDonald’s employs people in Europe.
‘At McDonald’s, as an employer of over 225,000 people in 27 Member States of the European Union ….’
(ref: European Employment Week 2009
http://www.employmentweek.com/)
😀 Haha, good one, let me think…
GalaxyZoo is bigger than the Galactic Federation, which currently boasts just over 200,000 members! 😉
On a more serious note, Galaxy Zoo is 115 times bigger than the population of my little town in coastal NC!
That’s wonderful – but I wonder if we might have a bit of granularity to that figure. How many of those are one hit wonders? Nothing against the transient visitor, it’s just a think we ought to know the slew of the demographic as well. At the moment we have just 61 of those 230,000 on the AGN sub-project, which at 0.026% isn’t really mass citizen science. I wonder, pretty please, if more could be done to flag up the existence of the sub-projects on the main site??
Rick, that’s a great one! We should open our own restaurant – it would be a good funding opportunity for the Zoo. 🙂
Veggy, I’ve been thinking about the sub-projects also. Is there somewhere a canonical list of all the sub-projects that are being worked on? I know the peas paper is out, and there is still irregulars, hypervelocity stars, overlapping spirals, and AGN. But I feel like I’m missing some. If there’s not a list already, could we create one on the forum?
Jordan: ‘We should open our own restaurant-…’.
It could serve coffee and be called ‘Starbursts’.
Man the Zoo has more people than my own hometowm down in the mid-south Pacific. We are a mighty force indeed.
Rick & Jordan: I love Rick’s finding! 😀 The thing is, the Cafe practically *is* a restaurant – we talk about food there all the time . . . perhaps we really should open one. I can cook – so can a lot of zooites I know 😀 (Half price coffee for Kevin!)
Rick: I think the name “Starbursts” has been taken…
How about “Pea Garden” or “Voorwerp Gardens”? %^D
Location, location, location…I would guess that all Zookeepers get FREE coffee.
Central London; the first citizen scientist cafe: ‘Come and classify galaxies whilst having our own luxurious latte, espresso or cappuccino’.
As for the name? Hmmm…’The Stars’; ‘Galaxy Paradise’; ‘The Classifier’; ‘Cafe Zoo’ etc. etc.
Well that nearly one person every mile from here to the Moon 🙂
Thought I’ve sent a msg to this blog before, guess me head has one too many galaxies. Anyway, the Zoo now has more volunteers than people living in my hometown down in the mid-south Pacific.
We have enough people in the Zoo to staff more than 2 US Aircraft Carriers. http://www.navy.mil/navydata/fact_display.asp?cid=4200&tid=200&ct=4
Scratch that. Meant to type “We have enough people in the Zoo to staff more than 20 US Aircraft Carriers” Each one holding around 6000 people including the Air Wings stationed on board.