Talk at International Astronomical Union – video and write up now available.
Way back in August I gave a evening (public) plenary talk about “The Zoo of Galaxies” at the 28th General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union. I wrote a couple of blog posts about it at the time (here and a bit more here). Just this week I got word that the video is now available, so here it is:
To go with this I have also posted the “proceedings” (a write-up based on my talks) which will be appearing in the 16th Volume of “Highlights of Astronomy”. This is available on the arxiv. It’s not supposed to be a transcript as such, but if you watch both the video and read this I think you’ll see they’re quite similar.
Galaxy Zoo 
Very cool! Thank you so much for posting this Karen!
The astro-ph document is now available from arXiv: A Zoo of Galaxies.
They are, indeed, quite similar, as you said. However, one intriguing difference is the absence of any mention of “Zooniverse MyResearch”, which makes its debut (so to speak) at around 29:50 (I’ll make a transcript later, and post it in the forum, if anyone’s interested).
This is the first I’d heard of this, and as it’s very much the sort of thing I’m interested in, I went looking for other mentions, on the internet.
I found none, at all, within the Zooniverse set of webpages (perhaps I didn’t look hard enough?); however, I did find a nice screen shot that’s very similar to the one in this video, in a Flickr “gallery curated by ttfnrob”, called “.Astronomy 4”: “A collection of great shots from the fourth .Astronomy meeting in Heidelberg, July 2012“. Click on this link
to see the screen shot; the accompanying text is “Projected onto the planetarium dome at #dotastro.” (for those who do not know, ttfnrob is a science team member, in the Andromeda Project).
Is this another secret Zooniverse project, I wonder?
“Zooniverse: My Research” evolved into the Navigator tool, which has been linked from the front page of Galaxy Zoo for quite some time (see here: http://www.galaxyzoo.org/#/navigator/home).
Thank you. With that I was able to find the one (and, as far as I can tell, only) mention of Navigator in this blog: Stripe 82 and colour images from Sloan (3 September, 2009).
Are these the same thing?
Both yours, Karen, and ttfnbob’s mentions (of MyResearch) are from the second half of 2012 (and GZ4 itself isn’t any older, is it?), but the “Stripe 82” blog post is from 2009.
May I suggest that a blog post on Navigator (and ZooTeach) would be of much interest to zooites (and beyond)? Even if it would hardly be news to those who’ve been using those tools.
Hi Jean,
The Navigator tool that Karen has linked to in her comment is different to the “Navigator interface” mentioned in that blog post.
The 2009 blog post is referring to the SDSS Skyserver Navigate tool that is available for each SDSS data release (well, at least since data release 6 which is when I started using data from SDSS!). This tool allows you to search a right ascension and declination and find out more information about the object at that position. For example, the data release 9 Navigate tool is available at http://skyserver.sdss3.org/dr9/en/tools/chart/navi.asp
The Galaxy Zoo Navigator is a new tool that allows you to classify galaxies in a group with you and then look into those classifications in more detail. I’ve put a few screenshots and a brief write-up into a blog post so I could go into a bit more detail than this comment http://jengupta.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/galaxy-zoo-navigator.html
Hope that helps 🙂
Jen
P.S. I work with Karen as the Outreach Officer for the ICG so if no one else writes an official blog post on Navigator and ZooTeach then I might see if they’ll let me do it!
There’s also more on Zooniverse education efforts in general at the Zooniverse Education Blog: http://education.zooniverse.org. These efforts include both Galaxy Zoo Navigator (renamed from MyResearch), and Zooteach which I mentioned in my talk, neither of which have been officially launched, but neither of which are secret either.