Stripe 82 : Digging Deeper
Anyone who has been classifying galaxies today may well have noticed a big change in the Zoo; the addition of some new images that don’t look quite like the previous set. These new galaxies come from a very special part of the sky known to the Sloan team as “Stripe 82”.
Over the first seven years of the Sloan survey, the telescope returned again and again to this part of the sky, comparing images from each visit in an attempt to discover supernovae (exploding stars) and detect objects which change in brightness. A nice side effect, though, is that we can add the different images together. This produces the same result as having left the telescope pointing at the same place for longer; images which show fainter objects and (hopefully) more detail in familiar ones.
This was too good an opportunity for us to pass up, and so we’ve added the Stripe 82 images to the Zoo. They look a bit different – more background noise, slightly different colours – but these are the deepest, most detailed images we’ve ever presented to Galaxy Zoo users. There are more than 40,000 new images – so get clicking!
Galaxy Zoo in the News!
Last year Kevin wrote about all the publicity we gained so far, from media covering the story of Hanny’s Voorwerp. In the meantime, that list kept growing. But also, with the launch of Zoo 2 and the discovery of the Peas, we got more and more attention.
Recently Kevin asked me to make a list of links to all those pages writing about Galaxy Zoo and to announce here where you can find it, which is on the Galaxy Zoo Forum. If you find an article I haven’t on my list yet, please feel free to send me a personal message so I can include it. And if you’re not a member yet, you can also send me an e-mail using: vampke83(at)hotmail.com.
Let’s keep spreading the word.
WHT joins the supernova hunt!
Greetings from the William Herschel Telescope at the Observatario del Roque de los Muchachos on La Palma, in the Canary Islands. Sarah and I have now arrived here, and tomorrow night, the 12th, we’ll join in the fun by observing some of the supernova candidates that you’ve identified in the PTF data. The weather here is currently perfect – beautiful dark clear skies, and incidentally a fantastic place to view the Perseid meteor shower.
Fingers crossed that this great weather remains for our two observing nights, and we can confirm those supernovae that you’ve been diligently hunting out. We’ll try to post regular updates tomorrow as to what we find out – though please bear with us if we appear slow to update; observing can sometimes be a very busy job!
Mark
Supernova Zoo updates
I’ve just added in the latest batch of images taken by the Palomar Transient Factory last night. The PTF surveys large areas the sky every night looking for new supernovae. The images from these observations are then run through an automated pipeline which flags potential new candidates which we show to you.
One of the most exciting aspects of Supernova Zoo is that we are showing Zooites images taken from the PTF telescope just hours earlier and if you mark it as something interesting then we very quickly show it to more people so we can get a definitive answer quickly. Finding new supernovae as early as possible is one of the main aims of Supernova Zoo, if and when we find something interesting Mark and Sarah are waiting to follow it up at the WHT.
Cheers
Arfon
Let's Go Supernova Hunting
We have a special challenge for you this week – Galaxy Zoo is going Supernova Hunting.
A supernova is an exploding star, capable of outshining an entire galaxy. We have a robotic telescope in Palomar, California sending us candidate objects from the galaxies it scans, and a team of Oxford astronomers are on their way to the Canary Islands to follow up the most likely.
The choice of galaxies to follow-up on is in your hands – we’ll be posting new data each day, and keeping a running list of those candidates that most Zooites think are likely supernovae. Get clicking…and you might well be the first to discover an exploding star.
Chris
(P.S. This is a prototype of a much larger project so all feedback and comments – good and bad – are of course welcome either here or on the forum.
Zoo 2 now available in Polish
As Lech eloquently explains in his post, Galaxy Zoo 2 is now available in Polish. Other languages should follow soon (and don’t worry – this blog will be mostly in English!)
Galaktyczne Zoo – Faza II już po polsku!
W wyjątkowym, bo pierwszym polskim wpisie na blogu projektu “Galaxy Zoo”, chcielibyśmy zaprosić Państwa do otwartej dzisiaj polskiej wersji językowej Zoo w fazie II.
Dzięki współpracy, jaką we wrześniu 2007 roku udało się nawiązać między Centrum Fizyki Teoretycznej PAN, programem EU-HOU i portalem Astronomia.pl, a naukowcami z programu Sloan Digital Sky Survey (w jej efekcie powstała polska wersja pierwszej fazy Galaktycznego Zoo), możemy zaprezentować Państwu dzisiaj przetłumaczony w całości na język polski serwis fazy II Zoo – zawierający wszystkie narzędzia i funkcjonalności znane z wersji angielskojęzycznej.
Podobnie jak w przypadku fazy I, internauci którzy zasiądą przed komputerami, żeby pomóc astronomom w klasyfikowaniu milionów galaktyk, czyli porządkowaniu wielkiego “zoo” jakim jest Wszechświat, mogą liczyć na wsparcie polskiego zespołu ekspertów, który odpowie na każde pytanie przesłane na adres galaktycznezoo@astronomia.pl.
Zespół, który w 2007 roku składał się z trzech astronomów (Ariel Majcher, Waldemar Ogłoza i Tomasz Skowron) liczy obecnie już siedem osób – do trzech panów dołączyło trzech kolejnych (Paweł Biernacki, Mirosław Kołodziej i Tomasz Czernik) oraz jedna pani (Marta Kotarba).
I to właśnie wymienionym wyżej wychowankom Młodzieżowego Obserwatorium Astronomicznego w Niepołomicach – Marcie i Mirkowi – należą się szczególne podziękowania, bo bez ich zaangażowania najprawdopodobniej nie udałoby się tak szybko uruchomić polskiego serwisu II fazy projektu “Galaxy Zoo” (Marta i Mirek przetłumaczyli wszystkie teksty i instrukcje, które można znaleźć w serwisie).
Polska wersja pierwszej fazy Galaktycznego Zoo, która jak dotąd jest jedyną narodową wersją w projekcie, okazała się niezwykle popularna – zaledwie w ciągu kilku miesięcy w serwisie zarejestrowało się ponad 10 tysięcy użytkowników, którzy pozostali aktywni przez kolejne kilkanaście miesięcy. W ten sposób powstała największa w polskim internecie społeczność astronomiczna i jedna z największych narodowych reprezentacji w “Galaxy Zoo” (w całym projekcie wzięło udział ponad 150 tysięcy internatów z całego świata). Mamy nadzieję, że w fazie II uda nam się powtórzyć ten sukces.
“Last but not least”, chcielibyśmy serdecznie podziękować naszym kolegom z programu SDSS, bez których polskie Zoo nigdy by nie powstało – “Dear Arfon, Chris and Jordan – thank you very much indeed!”
Lech Mankiewicz (CFT PAN, EU-HOU) i Jan Pomierny (Astronomia.pl)
How big is the Galaxy Zoo collaboration now?
Every once in a while, usually at the summer AAS meeting, the Zookeepers like to play a game called “How big is our collaboration now?” Last time, it was inspired by Chris and I attending a baseball game in St. Louis, and realizing that there were enough Galaxy Zoo volunteers to fill the stadium three times over. That led us into a discussion of “what else are we bigger than”?
Today, the Galaxy Zoo collaboration has 230,000 volunteers. How does that compare?
Galaxy Zoo at Galaxy Wars
A research conference on interacting and merging galaxies just concluded today, hosted by East Tennessee State University under the title “Galaxy Wars: Stellar Populations and Star Formation in Interacting Galaxies”. This is a favorite topic of many in the Zoo, and, as you might expect, Galaxy Zoo was represented both in presentations and in the discussion.
Read More…
Join us for the SDSS-III meeting! (says Jordan)
UPDATE: I, Jordan, am indeed the mystery blogger. Sorry about that – I forgot to click my name as the author. Thanks to Karen for solving the mystery! Also, the times are U.S. Eastern time (5 hours behind Greenwich time).
UPDATE THE SECOND: See below for a “time machine” that tells you when coverage will start in your local time zone.
Next week, the members of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey collaboration will be meeting in Princeton to talk about the present and future of the survey. Bob and I will be there to talk about Galaxy Zoo, and we’d like you to be there too.
For the first time, we’ll be giving you the opportunity to watch the meeting as it happens. We’ll be live-broadcasting the meeting on our channel on UStream TV, starting on Monday, July 27th at 8:30 AM U.S. Eastern Time. (UStream is a web site that lets you broadcast video from a hand-held camcorder over the Internet.) Head over to our UStream channel to see the broadcast schedule. The “time machine” below says what time it starts in cities around the world.
I’ll be available on the chat in the UStream channel to answer questions in real-time about the talks. Hope to see you on the broadcast!
Time machine
| Region or city | Time of first broadcast |
|---|---|
| New Zealand | 0030 (on Tuesday 28th July) |
| Sydney | 2230 (on Monday 27th July) |
| Adelaide | 2200 |
| China/Philipines/Singapore/Perth | 2030 |
| Thailand/Vietnam/Jakarta | 1930 |
| India/Sri Lanka | 1800 |
| Pakistan | 1730 |
| Moscow | 1630 |
| Saudi Arabia/Eastern Europe/Turkey/Israel | 1530 |
| Central & Western Europe/South Africa | 1430 |
| GMT/UK/Ireland/Portugal | 1330 |
| Brazil/Maritime Canada | 0930 |
| ET/New York/Toronto | 0830 |
| CT/Chicago | 0730 |
| MT/Denver | 0630 |
| PT/Los Angeles | 0530 |
| Alaska | 0330 |
| Hawaii | 0130 |
Galaxy Zoo 