A Galaxy Zoo – WorldWide Telescope Mashup
Have you ever found yourself staring proudly at the collection of beautiful and exotic galaxies that fill your favourites list? Have you ever wanted to share these objects with a friend or loved one and realized there was just no easy way to do it? Sure, you can click on the image, delve into SkyServer, and copy and paste one image at a time into an email, but… That gets kind of tedious pretty quickly, and if your favourites list is like mine, it’s not a 5-minute copy and paste kind of task.
Well, now there is an easier way to inflict your favourites on others.
We’re excited to announce the integration of WorldWide Telescope with Galaxy Zoo favorites. Over the past few months we have had the opportunity to work with Microsoft Research to bring your favorite galaxies to WorldWide Telescope. Instead of seeing an isolated image of the galaxy you can now immerse yourself in the WorldWide Telescope environment through easy to save and easy to share sky tours. We hope this allows you to better see your galaxies in their home environments on the sky.
This new tool, available at http://wwt.galaxyzoo.org, was created by two of my Southern Illinois University Edwardsville undergraduate students: sophomores Jarod Luebbert and Mark Sands. To give you a taste of how this interface works, they’ve created this great teaser video. We plan to push this out to the public on September 2, but because you’re reading this, you get a special sneak peak of both the website and the video.
Galaxy Zoo – WorldWide Telescope Mashup! from Galaxy Zoo on Vimeo.
Man vs Machine?
Manda’s paper on improving automatic galaxy classification seems to have caused quite a bit of concern and comment. Is the future of the Zoo portrayed above, with an out-of-control machine wrecking all we’ve come to hold dear? After all, we’ve always believed it important that we don’t waste your time by having you do tasks that computers are perfectly capable of completing. Are the Zookeepers putting the Zoo out of business?
Read More…
Greenwich meeting on Sunday
I meant to post about this earlier, so apologies for those who only read the blog and not the forum. My only excuse is that we’ve been busy hunting for Supernovae…
On Sunday 16th August, a motley gathering of Zooites and Zookeepers will be descending on the Royal Observatory, Greenwich. There are more details in the forum, but the general plan is as follows :
13.45 : Recommended Planetarium Show – The Sky Tonight Live. An ROG astronomer takes you around the night sky – a traditional, live planetarium show.
14.30 : Galaxy Zoo Tour of the ROG site – Led by Jim, not only an ROG astronomer but also developer on a future Zoo project. Meet in the Planetarium Foyer.
15.15 : Recommended Planetarium Show – Dawn of the Space Age. In the 40th year since the Apollo landings, the ROG’s new show looks back to how it all began.
16.00 : Meet the Zookeeper – In the ‘Discovery Space’ in the main ROG building. On the eve before the largest gathering of Zookeepers in history (for a team meeting) this is your chance to chat to some of the team who come from further afield. Confirmed victims attendees are Bill ‘NGC 3314’ Keel, Carie ‘Peas’ Cardamone and Jordan ‘Motivation study’ Raddick. I will also be making a less exotic appearance, but should have the first results from Galaxy Zoo : Supernovae to show off.
I’m afraid that it’ll be necessary to book tickets for the planetarium shows, but the astronomy displays provide more than enough to keep you busy otherwise.
The universe on a carpet (live from the SDSS-III meeting)
Greetings from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III meeting in Princeton! Today is the third and final day of the meeting, where we are planning the next year of operations for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III). The original SDSS, of course, provided all the beautiful galaxy pictures that you see in Galaxy Zoo; SDSS-III is an extension of that survey that extend the mission – and keep me quite busy! – until 2015.
The meeting is in the Astronomy Department in Peyton Hall at Princeton University. This is the first time I’ve been here since coming with the Brown University Band in 1996, and I had forgotten what a nice campus this is. And they’ve made an addition to the astronomy building that is the coolest thing ever – see this photo:
Kevin and Jordan at AAS
Here is another photo from the AAS meeting last week. Georgia Bracey took this photo, catching Kevin and I in the act of working during the reception before the opening of the International Year of Astronomy:
What can I say? I was curious about the peas, and Kevin had some results to show me.
After this photo was taken, Kevin shut down the laptop and we went back to drinking our free Sierra Nevada Galileo Ale. The opening of the International Year of Astronomy was great, featuring a live stream from the Cincinatti Observatory (through UStream – the video loads slowly, but it’s worth it), the premiere of a documentary called 400 Years of the Telescope, and the opening of the International Year of Astronomy island in Second Life. 2009 promises to be an exciting year in astronomy!
As promised – photos!
Chris giving his talk while wearing a pink shirt:
Kevin with his opening slide, which generated some applause from the audience:
Chris and Kevin take joint questions after both talks:
A zoo-tiful morning
Day 2 of the AAS meeting is here. The Zoo team talks were yesterday. The scheduling has been a bit odd at this meeting – Chris and Kevin’s talk was in a session about galaxies, while at the same time Bob was chairing a session on cosmology with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey in which Daniel was speaking. I was able to see all the talks by staying for Chris’s and Kevin’s, then switching rooms in time to see Daniel’s. I took photos of Chris and Kevin giving their talks – photos are coming soon, after I go back to the hotel to retrieve my camera’s transfer cable.Chris went first. He started by reviewing the Zoo in general, then reviewed some of the results from the red spirals and mergers projects. Chris has graciously agreed to make his slides available on the blog, but I am having trouble getting the blog to upload the PDF file. I’ll see if I can get someone to help me with it. Meanwhile, here is the first slide to tantalize you:
Kevin went next, talking about the blue ellipticals that he has written about on this blog in the past. The biggest hit of his talk, though, was his title slide, which was written in galaxies! The slide was made by Pat from the Galaxy Zoo forum. I have a photo of it that I will post later on.
When I get a few spare minutes, I’ll post some more about these talks, and about the Sloan cosmology session.
Liveblogging – AAS meeting
Greetings from Long Beach, California! I’m here along with Chris, Kevin, Bob, and Daniel Thomas at the twice-annual meeting of the American Astronomical Society.As we’ve done at previous meetings, I’ll be liveblogging events at the meeting. Between now and Thursday, I’ll be posting in real time about what I see and do at this meeting. Some of the other zookeepers will probably blog also.I’m part of a larger team of bloggers that is covering the meeting. You can follow the coverage at the Astronomy Cast Live blog.First up, at 10 AM Pacific time (7 PM GMT) is Chris and Kevin both talking about Galaxy Zoo results. See you then!
Inside the first results
As Jordan’s already said, this blog is supposed to give you, our users and collaborators, a window into the research we’re doing. As I suspect most of you know, we’re working on a set of papers which will hopefully be submitted to a journal in the next month or so. The first set will probably contain four papers, and I thought I’d give you a run down of what each of these four is designed to do.
Although the whole team will be listed as authors (and we’ll include a link to the site which gives credit to those of you who have chosen to enter the names on the special page on the site), each is being led by a different team member. My paper is a general overview of the project, including a discussion of the process by which we’ve gone from clicks on the webpage to a catalogue of galaxies. The idea is to provide all the information that others working with our data might need in one place, and to avoid having to duplicate information in each of the individual papers.
Steven (in Portsmouth) is writing a paper that focusses on comparing the spirals and the ellipticals; he has to be more careful than most to account for the tendency of faint fuzzy things to be classified as elliptical galaxies, and has developed a whole set of tools to keep an eye on this. The results are excellent; we’ve always known that ellipticals tend to live in denser environment than their spiral counterparts, but with Galaxy Zoo we can really look at the details of this relation.
Kevin’s paper discards most of the galaxies to focus on some of the oddballs; the infamous blue ellipticals. Most elliptical galaxies are supposed to have finished star formation long ago, but these are still going strong. We’re planning to publish a list of these in the paper so hopefully other people will be able to follow them up alongside us.
Finally, Kate and Anze are leading the cosmology study, looking at the rotation direction of spirals. They’re desperate to get the bias study that’s now underway done so that their paper can be finished off – that’s the most critical thing at the moment so every classification you make gets us closer to being able to release the first science results.In the meantime you’ll hear more about each of these projects over the next week or two on this blog, but do comment in the meantime either here or on the forum.
I’ll finish with a couple of mea culpas – when I send out the email announcing our Christmas gift to you, I should have said that the link was on the left of the analysis page, and realised that for some of you it was the Summer Solstice. I won’t make either mistake again (just different ones). Chris
Galaxy Zoo 