Galaxy Zoo DESI Published

I’m thrilled to announce the release of Galaxy Zoo DESI; detailed morphology classifications for all 8.7 million well-resolved galaxies in the DESI Legacy Surveys. This is the largest detailed catalogue ever made (by an order of magnitude). 

Today is the end of a long road. GZ DESI is being released eight years to the day after the first DESI images went live on Galaxy Zoo. It took four ‘generations’ of astronomers – Kyle Willett, Coleman Krawcyzk, myself, and Tobias Geron – to keep the project running. And of course, it took all of you. At least 105,459 people* contributed their time to making GZ DESI happen. Thank you all.

Releasing GZ DESI is also the start of a new journey. Space telescope Euclid is in the sky and taking pictures. The Vera C. Rubin observatory should see first light within a year. Both will find tens of millions more galaxies – even more than DESI. But we’re ready. GZ DESI let us build and test the AI tools that now work alongside you. Those tools mean that every classification you make helps us classify every other galaxy as well. And we’re starting to imagine what new tasks – beyond classification – we might be able to do. But that’s for another blog 😉

On to the next telescope!

Mike, and the Galaxy Zoo team

*(unique logged-in Zooniverse accounts)