You get up, you login to the forums to check for messages. You then open another window and login to classify galaxies. Back and forth, forums and classifications, forever logging in twice.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had all your galaxies and all our forum friends in one place?

We’re working to make that happen!

In the coming months the Galaxy Zoo classifications site (GalaxyZoo.org) and the Galaxy Zoo Forums (GalaxyZooForum.org) are going to adopt a shared login (for you tech heads, we’ll be using CAS). To make this happen smoothly we need your help.

If you do not have an account on the forums, you can stop reading now. If you are a forum user, please keep going.

About 2000 of you (and this includes me, so don’t feel guilty) have created a login on GalaxyZoo.org using one email address and on the GalaxyZooForum.org using a different email address. Can you do us a favor? Can you please make sure your accounts on both sites use the same email address? (And in case you forget, we will be emailing mismatched email holders later this week)

Here is how:

• Login to GalaxyZooForum.org and click on “Profile” and note what email address you have entered.
• Now login to GalaxyZoo.org and click on “Classify Galaxies” and then resist the temptation to classify the galaxy (okay fine, maybe pause to do 2 or 3 or 4 dozen), and then click on “Profile.” Check if your email on GalaxyZoo.org matches. If it doesn’t, please change your email on GalaxyZoo.org to match our email on GalaxyZooForum.org.

This is a Bad Example.

This is a Good Example.

Thanks in advance for all your help!

cheers,

Pamela

So far, Galaxy Zoo has been Slashdotted three times. It seems that by now, Galaxy Zoo has entered the web consciousness to such a degree that we get mentions like this:

 “I’m a physics teacher and have been wondering what ways it’s possible to get students to participate in or donate to real science projects. I encourage my students to help out with things like Galaxy Zoo (which has just released a new version) and to get them to install BOINC on their personal computers. Do Slashdotters out there have any other suggestions that would be appropriate for the 11-18 age range? Extra credit if you can think of a way that I can track their progress so that I can give them extra credit.”

The Zoo is growing – Building new exhibits, bringing in new animals, and making space for all of you to gather, talk and work. We actually can’t quite share all the cool new critters we’ll have on display.  What we can tell you is we are working to integrate the forums and science so that you only have to login once to get to both, and we are working to develop cool new toys for educators (teachers / Scout leaders / camp councilors) to help them use the Zoo to teach.

As we work to expand the Zoo, we want to know what you want to see!  What are your ideas? We are looking specifically for ideas that will help you learn more about the science you’re already doing so well.

If you are using Galaxy Zoo to teach or have ideas on how it can help you learn let us know! What would make classifying easier and what things are you doing on your own to improve your experience that we could build tools to make it easier? And if you are an educator, please tell us how you have already used the Zoo, and what you hope to do in the future. What are your needs?

For example, in the next year we we will be launching a new “Group Login” feature that will allow anyone working with a group of students to automatically create a set of logins for the students that they can later customize with their own usernames and emails. The group leader – the teacher or after school program leader – will have to see the classifications done by all the students and can use these classifications to teach statistics and astronomy.

We will also be pulling into your sidebars and the space beneath the classifications window a glossary of terms, links to more and more detailed background information about the science being studied and data sets being used. We will also be looking for ways to help you share your favorite objects (including eventually sharing them on sites like Facebook!)

These examples are a taste of some of the things we’ve come up with.  We also want to hear about what you’ve come up with. What do you need?  What do you think would be fun? How can we help make the Zoo better for you?

So, whether you’re using the Zoo for yourself or in your classroom, we’re asking everyone to share their ideas with us. Hanny is working to go through the forum to find the things you’ve already mentioned and she is looking for teachers who are already using the Zoo so we can learn about what they are doing and how we can make their lives easier. Pamela is working to collect these ideas, and with the help of the Galaxy Zoo Team, transform them into reality. So every time you think: “wouldn’t it be cool to have.” please contact Hanny via:   arkelhannyvan(at)gmail.com or Pamela at pgay(at)siue.edu and tell us your idea!

We’re both looking forward to working with each other, which is why we wrote this together, and to hearing from all of you!

Cheers,

Pamela L. Gay & Hanny Van Arkel

As I was doing a backup of the Zoo 2 database this morning I thought I’d do a quick count of how many classifications we’d had so far.  To my surprise we were only about 2000 short of the 15,000,000th.  So there I sat, at my laptop, waiting to see who’d get the honour of classification number 15,000,000.  As you might expect I didn’t have to wait very long before I had the answer…

The Zooite to make the 15,000,000th classification is newolder.  Thanks newolder for helping us past this major landmark!  I thought you might like to see which galaxy newolder was classifying at the time, and here it is:

Not that we check up on you (very often 😉 ) but I couldn’t help but check what classification newolder gave this galaxy.  You will be pleased to hear that they classified it as smooth, completely round and nothing odd.

15,000,000 classifications in less than a month is an amazing achievement.  Thanks again for all of your hard work.

Happy Classifying!

Arfon

The Galaxy Zoo Shop is now open for business offering some official ZOO merchandise. We are currently using Cafepress for the ordering, printing and distribution and  plan to add some more designs and other products as we go on.

If you have any queries about your orders etc — you will need to email Cafepress about it but I have found them to be very quick to respond to queries.

All profits will be used to support the work of the Zoo,  so if you feel like wearing the ZOO badge with pride check out the Zoo Shop at www.cafepress.co.uk/zooniverse

There’s a new addition to Galaxy Zoo today – inverted images.  As some of you may know, the Sloan images can be shown in either colour or inverted.

To switch to the inverted version of the galaxy just click on the link “Invert galaxy image”.  The inverted images can be useful in bringing out hints of structure that are otherwise hard to spot so we hope that you like this addition.

Happy classifying!

Arfon

Galaxy Zoo gets more observing time! As we explained before, getting observing time can be very difficult, especially on the most powerful telescopes on earth and in space. We were therefore very pleased when NASA posted the results of it’s Cycle 4 Announcement of Opportunity to use the Suzaku X-ray space telescope and we spotted a familiar target…. 

Those of you who have been following our quest to understand what `Hanny’s Voorwerp’ really is might recognise this – IC 2497 is the massive spiral galaxy next to the Voorwerp. We’ve already been successful in getting time on XMM-Newton, another X-ray space telescope, to get a good look at what IC 2497’s supermassive black hole is doing. With Suzaku, we’ll be able to peer even deeper into its murky hear. Suzaku is a Japanese-led hard X-ray space telescope, which can see photons with even higher energy than XMM-Newton, photons to energetic that pretty much nothing can block their way out. Thus, if there really is a currently feeding supermassive black hole in IC 2497, we’ll be able to see it. 

Suzaku began life as ASTRO-E, and was launched by the Japanese Space Exploration Agency (JAXA) back in 2005. It was named Suzaku, or ‘red bird’, for a number of reasons. Very early on in its mission though, it experienced a mysterious malfunction, which caused the Helium that was cooling its main instrument to leak into space, which effectively made it useless. It still has its other instruments, which are sensitive like no other right now to the high energy universe, and sometime in the next year or so, it will have a 75,000 second peak at IC 2497…! 

Today’s guest blogger is Half65 from the forum:

More than a year and a half ago an Italian weekly newspaper announced the selling, along with the magazine, of the complete saga of Star Wars in DVD at a very good price. Due to the fact that I’m a sci-fi addict and that I love that saga I decided to buy it. The weekly newspaper is not one of my favourites and I bought it only for the DVD and put the magazine on a table. One day I decided to make a little order and I rediscovered the magazine and I began rapidly to take a look at the pages. Suddenly something attracted my sense and I discovered that inside there was an article about astronomical matters but also a brief part about a project to classify galaxies. Strange thing, I thought at that moment, and I supposed it was something similar to seti@home, could be useful but boring. But the computer was on, as usual, and near me and, absent-mindedly, I began to type in the weird URL, without WWW, with the zoo word mixed with galaxy. I didn’t know, at that time, that I was a few steps from addiction. I read the home page then I began to surf in the various links and then …. I arrived at the tutorial page. And bang. Those pictures were beautiful. In that period I was regaining my astronomy passion and I had began to watch the lecture of Prof. Alexei V. Filippenko of Berkley University on web-cast. I remained captured. I read it all carefully. I made all of the examples and then I tried the entry test. Incredibly my first attempt was successful. “And now.” I was lost in space. I began to classify and, at classification no. 283, had a terrible doubt. Anticlockwise?

“It’s not important!” was my first thought. “They request we don’t agonize over the picture.” I was just a click away from losing a great opportunity to become addicted to another fundamental part of the project: the Forum. “A Forum! I never participated in a forum before. Why start now?” I don’t know why but I pushed the forum button and bang (again). I believed that the forum was a sort of FAQ and when I discovered that it is not and that the solution to my problems was to enter a question and wait for an answer I was lost. “Nothing so difficult,” you can say. Yes.

But the forum was in English, which is not my language. But I gave it a try and I wrote a message in an unreadable blue. Don’t be afraid, I don’t want to bother you with the all story of what happened after that. But I must mention the first member that “talked” to me and said: “Hi welcome to the zoo! i see an anti-clock too, but could you please not use the blue writing? its making my eyes go funny (nothing to do with being past my bed time honest) happy hunting”. And it was fluffyporcupine. Bang (there is a lot in this story). Probably without that gentle approach I would have been out of business. And thanks to that I can know other incredible members.

Alice the most lovely moderator in the known part of the Universe.
Hanny the famous discoverer of “Hanny’s voorwerp”.
NGC3314 my overlapping guru.
waveney Waveney my Perl guru.
Edd the great Administrator.
weezerd my electronic brother.
ElisabethB the great asteroid hunter.
Elizabeth the voice from the other side of the Ocean.
Infinity the secret agent of the forum.

Sorry I can’t mention all the members but that was my intention. And also I discovered a mad passion for topic=6732.0>overlapping galaxies, the Object of the Day and the Perl language. I’m able to participate to this project due to the patience and kindness of the members, especially with newbies (I’m still one). Learn English. Talk with real astronomers. Learn too much more and discovered that there was too much to learn. I was able to put together an Object of the Day collection and with them made little tour of the universe that could be visible with the last version of Google Earth. OK. STOP. I must finish now. Don’t be afraid if you don’t know English very well, if you have no degree, if you think that you can’t be of use to the project, that you can’t do the right thing, that you can’t do that. Stop thinking and go to the project and discover that even with a single classification you could be part of history.

Half65.

P.S.: This story was made with the kindness and essential help of Alice really the most lovely moderator in the known part of the Universe.