Excellent conditions
The conditions are now excellent (seeing of 0.7 arcseconds). I hope it stays like this all night. This is really exciting!
/Jakob
Awaiting the sunset
We’re sitting in the control room of WHT awaiting the sunset. Before sunset we should take some calibration data and finalise the list of candidates. New candidates are sent to us by e-mail all the time. Tonight we’ll have a go at some candidates we didn’t observe yestereday or need to get an additional spectrum of. There are som very faint challenging targets we still haven’t decided whether to include or not. The wheather is much better to night. Almost no clouds at all. This is going to be an exciting night!
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]
Galaxy Zoo 