Live Chat – Hangout with Us
2012 is turning out to be a great year for Galaxy Zoo science. From Voorwerpjes to mergers to barred galaxies, there is lots to talk about right now when it comes to Galaxy Zoo. Tomorrow afternoon we’ll be holding a live chat with Galaxy Zoo science team stars Chris Lintott and Karen Masters. Starting at 2pm British Summer Time (1300 UT, 9am in New York, 3pm in Paris), Chris and Karen will be answering your questions and talking about some of the recent Galaxy Zoo work, made possible why your efforts on galaxyzoo.org.
If you have anything you’d like to them to discuss, or any questions you’d like them answer, then please either leave a comment here or Tweet us @galaxyzoo. We’ll also take questions via Twitter during the live chat.
You can watch the live chat right here on the blog, via our YouTube channel, where the video will also be posted afterwards. We’ll put links here, as well as on Facebook and Twitter, nearer the time. We’ll be using Google Hangouts for the live chat, so you can add the Zooniverse’s Google+ page to your own Google+ circles and connect that way too.
UPDATE: The live chat will begin shortly. The video feed will be visible here nearer the time.
Multi-wavelength Viewer for Galaxy Zoo
Hi again,
We have the first tool in an alpha state online. The Multi-wavelength Viewer can be accessed at:
You will be able to visualize any SDSS galaxies that you classified in the current iteration of Galaxy Zoo. We provide all five filters of the galaxy (U, G, R, I, Z), and offer you tools to scale and stretch the pixels in this image. There is quite a large todo list for this tool, but feel free to ask questions and offer feedback.
Enjoy!
Amit
Lens Zoo is Coming!
We’re very pleased to tell you that we’ve been awarded developer time from the Citizen Science Alliance to build a new, exciting Zooniverse project to discover gravitational lenses.
What’s a gravitational lens, you might ask? When a massive galaxy or cluster of galaxies lies right in front of a more distant galaxy, the light from the background source gets deflected and focused towards us. These space-bending massive galaxies allow us to peer into the distant Universe at around 10x magnification, and to make accurate measurements of the total (dark and luminous) mass of galaxies.
As many of you know, there has been a long-running and enthusiastic search for lenses in the “weird and wonderful” part of the forum; although lens-finding was never a goal of the Galaxy Zoo project, this forum has turned up some interesting systems which we are still following up. Up until now, the GZ lens search has been quite informal: it has not been easy keeping track of all the candidates that have been suggested! Nevertheless, the Lens Hunters have done an amazing job, collecting and filtering the suggestions as they come in, and teaching themselves and each other about the astrophysics of lensing.
Impressive stuff: enough to persuade a group of professional astronomers that a specially-designed Zoo for identifying lenses could be a powerful way of analyzing the new wide-field imaging surveys that are coming online. In this Lens Zoo we will be able to provide you with new tools – designed, we hope, with you – to find new lenses more effectively. We have teamed up with astronomers from several big surveys who are eager to harness your citizen science power, and will be providing a lot of new, high quality data to be inspected. Over the next 6-10 months we’ll be working hard with the Zooniverse developers to build the Lens Zoo, and we hope you will join us for the ride: Lens Zoo needs you!
Phil, Aprajita, Anupreeta & the Lens Zoo team.
Visualizing FITS Images In Browser
In the next week we will deploy the first of a slew of tools for Galaxy Zoo. This tool is dubbed the “Multi-wavelength Viewer” (please suggest names if you have something clever). Though the current iteration of Galaxy Zoo is called “Galaxy Zoo: Hubble”, there still exists quite a few galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), 51861 galaxies to be exact. We are processing these data to make them available to you.
Right now users are presented with color images that have been derived from raw astronomical data. With this tool we want to provide you with greater access to the raw data so you can experience the complexity of astronomical images in its true form with your morning garcinia cambogia tea. You will be able to see each galaxy in the five color filters that SDSS images (u, g, r, i, and z).
Providing these data via the web is a challenge. The main difficulty is the file size that must be transmitted from our servers to your computer. It is much easier to send over color JPEGs compared to full blown FITS images (the standard astronomical format). The solution that we developed is to use the PNG format, or rather an AstroPNG format. This allows us to pack quite a lot of information in a small file size. We hope this will be a good solution for representing astronomical images in browser. We’ll be looking for feedback, and working to make improvements as we share these alpha stage tools with you.
New Features Coming to Galaxy Zoo
Dear Galaxy Zoo Community,
It’s about time to introduce myself. My name is Amit, and I joined the Zooniverse development team last fall at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago. Our development group has grown, which means we have exciting new Zooniverse projects in the pipeline, but we also have new features coming to Galaxy Zoo in the near future.
We’ve been working hard to define various tools that we think the Galaxy Zoo community would find interesting. Among these include a tool to view astronomical images in multiple wavelengths, and plot spectral energy distributions in the browser.
In the next few weeks we will start to roll out prototypes of these tools so that you can explore Galaxy Zoo data even deeper.
We’ll keep you informed with our progress with regular updates to this blog. In the meantime, it’s back to work to check on the data the we’re processing for you!
Amit
Voorwerpje paper submitted
Bill has written an excellent post about the Voorwerpje, or small Voorwerp, hunt over on the main Zooniverse blog. You should read it!
365 Days of Astronomy Podcast – Do Bars Kill Spirals?
The podcast today over at 365 Days of Astronomy is “Galaxy Zoo 2 – Do Bars Kill Spirals?” by Chris and me. We had great fun talking about the first result from Galaxy Zoo 2 – that bars are more common in redder (deader?) spirals. Hope you enjoy listening to it.
You can read more about that project in the previous blog posts about it.
More on our fake AGN
Carie’s announcement of the addition of fake AGN has stirred up a storm on the comment thread, and in the forum. I’ve replied where I can, but I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding that it’s worth highlighting here :
We’re not trying to get you to identify AGN – we want you to classify the galaxies just as you always would. The aim is to test whether the presence of such an AGN affects the classification of the shape of the galaxy. If they do, we need to measure the size of the effect. So don’t go AGN spotting – except for fun – but keep classifying.
I hope that helps.
Chris
P.S. If you do want to know if you’ve identified a fake AGN, then the galaxy’s examine page will say so and the ID will begin AHZ7….
Galaxy Zoo classifications in SDSS Database
The latest release of data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey happened yesterday (SDSS3 blog article about the release). This has been widely talked about as providing the largest ever digital image of the sky, but one thing which might have passed your notice is that as part of this data release your Galaxy Zoo classifications (from the first phase of Galaxy Zoo) have been integrated into the SDSS public database (CasJobs). This will make GZ1 classifications all that more accessible for professional (and amateur?) astronomers to use in their research, and we hope to see some exciting and novel new uses coming out.
I’ll finish by including this visualization of the SDSS3 imaging data made by Mike Blanton and David Hogg (OK so I can’t work out how to embedd a YouTube video here, so here’s the link!).
Zooniverse's Arfon Smith on NPR SciFri
Listen to Zooniverse technical lead Arfon Smith talk about citizen science on NPR’s Science Friday: http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/201101072
Galaxy Zoo 