We’re having a great response to the launch of Zoo 2, so we are having to move to a more powerful computer. It’ll only take a couple of minutes, and then everything will work faster!

The long wait is finally over, and anyone visiting the main Galaxy Zoo page will now see a brand new, sparkling Zoo 2 site. The results from the beta site are stunningly good, and we are sure that Zoo 2 will produce as much science – and as many surprises – as the original Galaxy Zoo did.

Of course, we need your help, so please do log on to the site and get classifying. Along the way you’ll notice a few new features; for starters, the images are hosted on our brand new server system at Amazon web services, so you should be able to classify as quickly as you like without us slowing you down. For the first time in Zoo 2, ‘My Galaxies’ works so you’ll be able to revisit galaxies gone by and find new information about old favourites. And speaking of favourites, you’ll be able to select and view your own favourite galaxies as you go.With that, I’ll say thank you to the team who put Zoo 2 together, particularly Arfon, and go and classify some galaxies.

P.S. The site’s up 90 minutes early, so if it’s before midnight GMT then don’t tell anyone ;-).

It’s hard to move, or at least to read a newspaper, in the UK without coming across a mention of Twitter, the microblogging service. If you’re interested, you can find our Twitter feed here – we seem to be counting down to something at the minute.

Twitter Updates

• Auntie’s been on the phone : we’re at T minus 3 days and holding. 32 minutes ago
• T minus 3 days… (this is getting exciting) 1 day ago
• T minus 4 days… 2 days ago

follow me on Twitter

2:01 PM: Kevin and LankyYankee are here. Kevin is showing off new pictures of the Voorwerp. Kevin says that there will be one paper announcing the discovery, and another sharing the XMM Newton data.

2:06 PM: Kevin is comparing the Voorwerp to NGC 1068, another mystery AGN. What makes NGC 1068 so strange is that you only see the very highest-energy x-ray images, because all lower energies are scattered by the thick gas in the galaxy. There are two possibilities for the Voorwerp – either it is a heavily obscured AGN like NGC 1068, or it is dead, and we can only see the light echo as the Voorwerp.

2:11 PM: Kevin: “Scientific publication is unlike most other kinds of publication in that the author pays to publish the papers…. a typical paper in the Astrophysical Journal is a couple thousand dollars.”

2:21 PM: Kevin and I just called each other on Skype while sitting 2 feet apart, to test the camera. LankyYankee is now telling us how he found out about Galaxy Zoo. He’s saying that he got involved in the forum after her “got tired of clicking star/don’t know, and wanted to talk to people.”

2:54 PM: We’ve been trying to get a live link going with Astrofest in the U.K., but alas, no luck. Hanny and weezerd say hello, though!

3:07 PM: Success! We now have a conference call with 8 Zooites!3:10 PM: My lovely wife is here also. While we’re setting up the audio conference, she’s talking with LankyYankee about our plans for the weekend.

3:17 PM: We now have people from 4 countries on the call, but the group in Astrofest is not among them. Kevin is theorizing that they have been thrown out of the pub again. 🙂

3:20 PM: Apparently on the <a href="http://www.galaxyzooforum.org/index.php?topic=273032.330">Astrofest thread at the Galaxy Zoo Forum, people are talking live about our current breakdown in communications. Alice, Hanny, and FluffyPorcupine are all in London, but all their phones are off. 🙂

3:23 PM: I should stop blogging for a moment so I can focus on getting this figured out. More soon.

“Wow! Just wow!”

Over the last week I’ve been taking a look at the data that many of you have been generating on the Galaxy Zoo 2 beta site. It’s great to see that the Galaxy Zoo magic is working again, and this time we have so much more information about each galaxy! We really are going to be able to do some amazing research with the Galaxy Zoo 2 data.

However, the current task is quality control, in particular making sure that the answers we are getting correspond to what we had in mind when we came up with the Galaxy Zoo 2 questions. We want to be sure that we aren’t asking questions that can’t be answered given the typical quality of SDSS images, or that aren’t going to give us useful information about the galaxies. We also want to see where we may be able to improve the questions to better discriminate between different types of galaxy, and where we should rewrite the tutorial to give more guidance.

This testing was one of the reasons for having a beta stage. However, even though the data collected so far was for mainly for quality control, we will definitely also be using it for science. In particular, it will give us a preliminary idea of the results we can expect to find in the full Galaxy Zoo 2 dataset, which we can advertise at conferences this spring. Thanks to all our beta testers for helping us to ensure that Galaxy Zoo 2 will be a success.

To show you how well the current Galaxy Zoo 2 system is working, here is a prettified version of the page I made which got me saying “Wow!”, Chris jumping around his office, and made the whole team very happy when it was sent around on Friday. (Sorry if the images load slowly – there are a quite a lot of them!)

I’m now adding more quantitative information for the team, such as graphs of the distribution of answers for each question, to test all the things I described above so that we can improve the tutorial and classification system ready for the imminent full launch of Galaxy Zoo 2 to the world.

Kevin, LankyYankee, and I have been chatting on the forum about the Galaxy Zoo New York meetup, coming up this Saturday.

The current plan is that we will meet at the Housing Works bookstore/cafe at 2 PM on Saturday, February 7th. Housing Works is at 126 Crosby Street, near the intersection of Houston and Broadway. The nearest subway stops are Broadway-Lafayette on the B/D/F/V line and Bleecker St. on the 6.

An extra-exciting feature of Saturday’s meetup is that we’ll be chatting live with a simultaneous meetup of Zooites at Astrofest 2009 in London. Yay, our first transatlantic meetup!

Let me know, in the comments section here or the forum thread, if you’ll be able to come.  I’ll grab a table a few minutes before 2 PM. Look for me there, wearing a Johns Hopkins University t-shirt. This is what I look like:

Kevin and Jordan at AAS 

(I’m the one on the right)

See you there!