Midnight posting
It’s almost midnight here at La Palma. The sky is much clearer now, although occasionally some clouds are in the way. We have taken spectra of a bunch of candidates, but there’s still plenty of objects to visit. Thanks supernova hunters for keeping us busy tonight!
/Jakob
Starting observing
Here at the William Herschel telescope we (Isobel and Jakob) have started to observe the candidates found by the supernova hunters. There were some clouds earlier, but the sky is getting clearer. The first spectrum is taken right now and we got a long list of excting candidates from the Supernova Zoo to investigate.
Supernova Hunt Underway Again!
For those of you who took part in the Galaxy Zoo Supernova Hunt back in August – good news: the site is now back live, with an improved tutorial and interface. We hope that you like the changes that we have made.
A supernova is an exploding star, capable of outshining an entire galaxy. We have a robotic telescope from the Palomar Transient Factory in California sending us candidate supernovae from the galaxies it scans, and, as in August, we have two astronomers from Oxford standing by at the William Herschel Telescope on the island of La Palma in the Canary Islands. They will observe the best of the candidates that you identify.
Our last experiment in August was very successful, and so this time we’re looking at a much larger set of data in an attempt to work out just how common each type of supernova really is. The Supernova Hunt site has been live since Friday, and already there are no shortage of candidates for us to investigate further. But of course, we need more! If you didn’t get the chance to take part last time, please do spend a few minutes reading the tutorial, and enjoy hunting for supernovae! Any feedback or comments are very welcome, either here or over on the Galaxy Zoo forum. And, we’ll try to post regular updates from WHT as to how the observing run progresses. Let’s hope for good weather – you can keep an eye on that here using the webcams (during daylight!) and satellite feeds.
Mark
Galaxy Zoo and the Nobel Prize
No, no one on the Zoo team has won the Nobel Prize. But there are interesting connection with the 2009 Physics prizes, just announced by the Swedish Academy. The prize was shared by Charles Kao, Willard Boyle, and Charles Smith. Kao’s work contributed greatly to making fiber optics feasible for reliable transmission of signals at high bandwidth, a prerequisite for the Internet as we know it today. And incidentally, optical fibers have multiplied the effectiveness of spectrographs for astronomical surveys, by letting us pipe light from hundreds of objects at once into a single spectrograph; this is how all the SDSS spectra examined by Zooites were obtained.
Boyle and Smith shared the prize for their work in inventing charge-coupled devices. These are the electronic chips used for digital images, which have multiplied the reach of astronomical telescopes and worked their way into tens of millions of digital cameras. Compared to photographic emulsion, CCD chips are vastly more sensitive, can be calibrated more accurately, are reusable, and provide their output immediately in digital form for computer analysis or telemetry. Of course, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey made good use of these properties, with a mosaic of CCDs behind five different filters scanning the sky.
Finally, I suspect the prize committee was aware of the Galaxy Zoo project. At the very end of their excellent document on the science behind the prizes, we read:
“In science, the possibility of transferring and processing images digitally is a real revolution. Digital image processing is now a global commodity which enables, for instance, the best international expertise to be involved in crucial diagnostic and even surgical situations, through remote control and feedback through digital cameras. Furthermore the evaluation of large amounts of data (e.g. created in mapping the universe) can be spread to many groups and even to volunteers from the general public.”
Hmmmm. Data mapping the Universe, whose evaluation is shared among volunteers from the general public. That reminds me of something… At any rate, I think I can speak for the whole Zoo community in saying to Kao, Boyle, and Smith – congratulations, and a special vote of thanks!
Galaxy Zoo gets a mention on The Archers
Someone sent me the following link:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/archers/catch/
Friday’s episode (October 2nd), 5:50 in. It’s a cute mention.
“People all over the world, categorizing galaxies… It’s rather, addicting,
actually.
Google Powered GZ2 Bar drawing spin off, 1 down….
Firstly, I’d like to thank all those users who have used the bar drawing website. As of yesterday at 10pm we have recorded responses from 97 unique users and every galaxy had been looked at by at least one user. This is excellent news and we are delighted with the response the site has received.
The site can be found here: http://www.icg.port.ac.uk/~hoyleb/bars/ and the forum here.
We know some users have experienced problems accessing the site. We apologise if this has caused frustration. We remind you that our site is best viewed in Firefox[download here] – response with IE is particularly unreliable. Right now the bar drawing site is hosted at the University of Portsmouth, so the server is not as fast as the main Galaxy Zoo server. If site speed continues to be a problem and/or we start attracting significantly more users we will consider moving the site. Also remember that Google Maps set the zoom level. If you zoom in further than they have data you will see only a white image. Just zoom out until you can see the galaxy. Most other problems can be solved by hitting the reset button  –  if you reload the page you will move to the next galaxy.
Due to popular demand, we have added a counter to the site, showing you how many classifications you have made.
Thanks for all your help and input.
Ben and Karen [on behalf of the bar drawing team]
Zooing all over the world
I last updated the Galaxy Zoo city league table back in April. How do things look now? In good old fashioned reverse order :
10 Down from 2nd last time, Manchester. Having e-MERLIN to play with is obviously distracting our good friends at Jodrell.
9 A new entry – Los Angeles. Presumably Hollywood doesn’t have enough stars of its own.
8 Berlin The first non-native English speaking city to make the list. Will it be the highest?
7 A suprise 5th last time, Bristol is down two spots this time.
6 The third new entry in a row is Melbourne, according to Wikipedia home to the world’s largest tram network.
5 Down two spots from 4th last time, New York is the highest ranked American city.
4 The team behind the Polish translation of Galaxy Zoo 2 have been working hard, and they’re rewarded by seeing Warsaw in 4th place. It’s not the highest new entry, though.
3 Rising four places, Sydney. Australians can’t stand the sight of a league table they’re not on the top of.
2 In second, this chart’s highest new entry – Eindhoven. A stunning performance from our Dutch classifiers.
1 But hanging onto first place in the Zoo classification stakes is London. Can anything topple the legions of office-bound zooites from the top of the tree?
Merger Papers Accepted for Publication in MNRAS
Thanks for everyone’s work – both papers should soon be appearing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 🙂
Galaxy Zoo motivation study paper accepted!
Our paper on the motivations of Galaxy Zoo users has been accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy Education Review! Now that the paper has been accepted, I have posted it on the arXiv system. Head on over and read it if you’re interested in hearing more about the interviews we did with some of you to learn what makes Galaxy Zoo appeal to you. I wrote a summary of the paper for this blog a while back, but now you can read the paper itself.
The paper should appear in the Galaxy Zoo Library in the forum soon, and Pamela, Georgia, or I would be glad to answer any questions you have about the paper there. The next step in this research is to analyze the data from the survey that many of you took, and we’re working on that step now. Updates on that will come soon. Thanks to my lovely co-authors, and of course to all of you, without whom this none of this research would be possible!
Galaxy Zoo 