Typing of candidates
Using quick and dirty reductions we have begun identifying the candidates. We have found both type Ia and type II supernovae. It’s soon twilight and we have to take some calibration data before sunrise. Tomorrow night we’ll continue observing. We are pretty tired, so we’re looking forward to a good days sleep.
/Jakob
11 targets left
We now have 11 targets left which we can do tonight. Some of the candidates, which are no longer visible tonight, we aim at observing tomorrow. It’s just a couple of hours until twilight, but we should be able to make it. When the night begun the list looked so long, but now it feels like we’re running of targets. We need more candidates! Please help us find them!
/Jakob
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?
She's an Astronomer: Aida Berges
Aida Berges (“lovethetropics“) lives in Puerto Rico with her husband and children. Originally from the Dominican Republic, she studied there in an all girl Catholic school (Colegio del Apostolado) where she was inspired by her her history teacher (Rosa Maria Reyes Feriz). After graduation she started a university degree in Law where Supreme Court Judge Ana Rosa Berges Dreyfuss (a family member) became a beloved teacher. After finishing her degree in English at a different university, she worked various secretarial jobs and as a translator. She moved to Puerto Rico to live with her eldest brother and his wife, and there met husband (Benito Garcia Mendez). Her main job for the last almost 30 years has been as a dedicated wife and mother to children Benny and Laura (now grown; Benny works in retail and Laura is finishing her Masters’s degree in Psychology). The family spent most of this time in Puerto Rico, except for a 7 year spell in New Jersey where the children were born. Aida loves to read history, science fiction and fantasy. She has 3 dogs and one cat. And she loves the ocean, especially going to the beach or just watching the waves.
- How did you first hear about Galaxy Zoo?
I was reading CNN online and found an article describing how a very young teacher from the Netherlands had found a new kind of object and it was called Hanny’s Voorwerp. It was an article to celebrate the first year of Galaxy Zoo. I went to Galaxy Zoo immediately and my life changed forever…It was like coming home for me.
- What has been your main involvement in the Galaxy Zoo project?
I am part of the Irregulars Project and also the Hyper-Velocity Stars Project (and check out their blog). In the Irregulars Project I look for irregulars galaxies and send them to Richard Proctor to be integrated into the hunt. We now have more than 17,000 irregulars and the numbers keep growing every day. And we still need the help of the Zooites with their clicks on the Irregular Hunt (check out the Irregulars Project forum discussion). I send Richard between 100 and 500 possible irregulars every week. I also worked on the three Pea hunts, the Mergers hunt, the Voorwerpjes hunt and the Supernova hunt. And I found an unusual green object ages ago which has been dubbed Aida’s disturbed green mystery object and has been an object of the day (OOTD). We still don’t know what it is.
Both major projects I’m involved have been pure coincidence or serendipity. With the Irregulars Project I was the one getting the galaxies for the hunt and when we decided to write the first paper about astronomy without being astronomers I was included. I classified by myself 24,000 galaxies to clean the sample from spirals, elliptical galaxies, artifacts and unidentifiable blobs. Then classified 12,000 more!
For the HVSs project it was pure coincidence that I found two in about five minutes. I had to Google the term Hyper-velocity Stars because I had no idea they existed. Posted it on the newbies thread and I had to post an “Object of the Day” (OOTD on High Velocity Stars) and Thomas Jennings gave me the idea to post the known HVSs. Zookeeper Jordan read the OOTD and got so excited a group of fearless zooites decided to look for more, I am one of them…we are almost ready to post the first entry on a new thread for them on Galaxy Zoo. So far there are only 16 or 17 known HVSs. But we are still very optimist we can find more of them even if it is for sheer numbers. (We zooites are bigger than the Swiss Army.)
- What do you like most about being involved in Galaxy Zoo?
- What do you think is the most interesting astronomical question Galaxy Zoo will help to solve?
- How/when did you first get interested in Astronomy?
- What (if any) do you think are the main barriers to women’s involvement in Astronomy?
- Do you have any particular role models in Astronomy?
I would have to say that the Zookeepers are my role models because before getting involved on Galaxy Zoo I didn’t know any astronomers. Chris Lintott and Jordan Raddick specially because we are doing the Irregulars Project together. And Jordan Raddick is double because he is helping us with the HVSs. And Bill Keel (NGC3314), I am helping him get more possible Voorwepjes. Thomas Jennings started the Newbies thread and has gone back to college to study Astronomy. That’s what I call commitment. The person who inspired me to love science in general was my sister Adolfina. She is a medical doctor with specialties in Pediatrics and Hematology. She and her husband, who is also a hematologist discovered an element in the blood unknown until they found it. She is also the best and most loving sister anyone can have.
I would also like to include thanks to my parents Rafael Bergés Lara and Thelma García de Bergés, and my Uncle Manuel Bergés Lara and Aunt Carmen
This post is part of the ongoing She’s an Astronomer series on the Galaxy Zoo Blog is support of the IYA2009 cornerstone project of the same name (She’s an Astronomer). We are listed on the She’s an Astronomer website in their Profiles. This is the 7th post of the series. So far we have interviewed
- Hanny Van Arkel (Galaxy Zoo volunteer and finder of Hanny’s Voorwerp).
- Dr. Vardha Nicola Bennert (researcher at UCSB involved in Hanny’s Voorwerp followup and the “peas” project).
- Alice Sheppard (Galaxy Zoo volunteer and forum moderator).
- Carie Cardamone (graduate student at Yale who lead the Peas paper).
- Gemma Couglin (“fluffyporcupine”, Galaxy Zoo volunteer and forum moderator).
- Dr. Kate Land (original Galaxy Zoo team member and first-author of the first Galaxy Zoo scientific publication; now working in the financial world).
Still to come in the series – more Galaxy Zoo volunteers and researchers. We’re not done yet!
Galaxy Zoo 