Anyone who has been classifying galaxies today may well have noticed a big change in the Zoo; the addition of some new images that don’t look quite like the previous set. These new galaxies come from a very special part of the sky known to the Sloan team as “Stripe 82”.
Over the first seven years of the Sloan survey, the telescope returned again and again to this part of the sky, comparing images from each visit in an attempt to discover supernovae (exploding stars) and detect objects which change in brightness. A nice side effect, though, is that we can add the different images together. This produces the same result as having left the telescope pointing at the same place for longer; images which show fainter objects and (hopefully) more detail in familiar ones.
This was too good an opportunity for us to pass up, and so we’ve added the Stripe 82 images to the Zoo. They look a bit different – more background noise, slightly different colours – but these are the deepest, most detailed images we’ve ever presented to Galaxy Zoo users. There are more than 40,000 new images – so get clicking!