I have a confession…
What was the final Zoonometer™ count? You can find out here…
Galaxy Zoo at the British Astronomical Association
On Saturday I gave the after dinner talk at the British Astronomical Association (BAA) annual weekend in Winchester. At the BAA they call this talk the Alfred Curtis Memorial Lecture in memory of Alfred Curtis – a former BAA member who was instrumental in setting up the BAA annual weekend.
I’ll confess I didn’t know much about the BAA before this talk, and I came away extremely impressed at the level of knowledge and commitment about astronomy that I saw among its members. I was surprised to learn about how professional some of the observing facilities and programs of amateur astronomers are. Saturday night was very clear, so I was expecting the group would be anxious to head out for some star gazing, but actually many of them preferred to chat about the latest advances in astronomy at the bar with friends they don’t see too often, and leave their observing for nights they can really concentrate. They impressed me with information about their semi-automated observing of variable stars, or supernova which they then analyze on a computer, in much the same way that professional astronomers conduct observations
Many of the audience guessed in advance that I would be talking about Galaxy Zoo, despite my slightly cryptic title – “Finding Spirals – How to Look at a Million Galaxies”, and many of them told me afterwards about their involvement with Galaxy Zoo. We caught the end of the 100 hours of Astronomy drive (although after the 1 million classifications goal was met) so I advertised that in the talk, hoping to inspire some new Zooites.
The aim of my talk was to show all the interesting thing we can learn about galaxy formation and evolution from galaxy classifications. Rutherford famously said “All science is physics or stamp collecting”, my talk was in defense of the great physics you can do after you do some stamp collecting and sort out your album! I started by introducing the basic classifications of galaxies, and going back to the original 1926 paper by Edwin Hubble about galaxy classification. I then talked about the basic picture we have for galaxy formation and evolution in our expanding universe in light of the differences we observe between the two main classes of galaxies, such as spirals being mostly blue and solitary (or at least not in large clusters), and ellipticals being mostly red and in clusters or groups. I then talked about the digital revolution in astronomy and how we now have catalogues of millions of galaxies which astronomers cannot hope to visually classify themselves. Of course this is where I started talking about Galaxy Zoo with lots of stuff about how popular it is, and all the exciting discoveries that have so far come out of the first phase of Galaxy Zoo. I talked a little bit about my own work using Galaxy Zoo, looking at how the colours of the spirals vary with viewing angle. I finished by advertising Galaxy Zoo 2. I talked about some of the impressive statistics (like passing the 20 million clicks mark), and showed some of the examples of successful classifications. At the very end I showed a sneak peak of the Google Earth Tour of spiral galaxies which Ben Hoyle and myself made at Portsmouth. You can see this for yourself once you have classified at least 100 galaxies in Galaxy Zoo 2.
Karen.
Edit: a picture of BAA president, Roger Pickard and me deep in discussion about Galaxy Zoo.
The millionth click
It’s been a great day – we sailed past our target of 1 million clicks in 100 hours late this Saturday morning. The site became a little sluggish as the couter got closer and closer to the 1 million mark, probably because everyone was hitting the refresh button (I know I was!).
Anyway, we made it and with plenty of time to spare. We’ll keep the Zoonometer™ until the end of the 100 hours to see how far we get – my bet is for something close to 1.5 million.
So I know you all want to know. Who made the 1 millionth click and what was the galaxy? The galaxy that received the 1 millionth click was this this gem SDSS J084054.83+422839.8:
The Zooite to make the 1 millionth click was jdavenport. jdavenport joined Galaxy Zoo back in August 2008 when the original Galaxy Zoo was still active. jdavenport has also classified a serious number of galaxies: 531! Thanks jdavenport for all of your help with Galaxy Zoo and thanks to all of you for helping us achieve 1 million clicks in (less than) 100 hours!
Greetings from Kuala Lumpur
A couple of members of the Galaxy Zoo team were in Malaysia over the last week at this conference, organised by the University of Nottingham:
On Friday morning Steven and Ramin gave talks featuring our results on how galaxy morphology changes depending on the environment where a galaxy lives, how that affect varies with how massive a galaxy is, and comparing with what we see in terms of galaxy colours. Galaxy Zoo’s clear indication that there is an important population of red spirals in dense environments tied in very well with the theme of the conference and the discussion we’ve had over the past week. Both talks were well received – everyone is really interested in the things we can do with the fabulous dataset you’ve all helped to produce. Our recent startling discovery also received a brief mention!
We’ve featured all this work on the blog before. You can read about it here, here and here.
Everyone agrees that it’s been a really excellent conference, full of interesting talks and useful discussions, and a very enjoyable social side too. We’re already looking forward to the next!
Halfway through, 700,000 galaxies done
We’re now 50 hours into the 100 hours of astronomy, and we’re well on course to hit Galaxy Zoo’s target of a million galaxies in 100 hours. The Zoonometer &trade clicked over 700,000 galaxies this morning which is an incredible response to our call – but not yet good enough!
Keep clicking to get us over the line…
20 Million
With all of the buzz about the Galaxy Zoo Zoonometer™ and our challenge to reach 1 million clicks in 100 hours it’s easy to forget that these 1 million clicks are just part of a much larger total.
Late yesterday afternoon we smashed through the 20 million mark and the Zooite who has the honour of the 20 millionth click is ‘cor riff’. ‘cor riff’ has so far classified 281 galaxies which makes them somewhat of a veteran.
The Galaxy to receive the 20 millionth click? This rather nice (albeit fuzzy) barred spiral. SDSS J154503.53+142521.0
Thanks ‘cor riff’ and all of the other Zooites for your ongoing contribution to Galaxy Zoo. Now back to that Zoonometer™…
Mergers Update
Two recent things:
1) Owing to the poor weather, we’ve had to put in another application to the 30m dish this summer. I shall be sure to track down the fox’s lair with the snow gone in search of my lost champagne. We’ve also submitted a sample of spiral-spiral mergers to be viewed by the William Hershel Telescope on the Canary Islands as part of a ‘Do spirals survive mergers’ project. Should lead to some stunning images if succesful.
2) The original merger paper got split into two because there was so much in it! These were recently placed on Astroph for the whole scientific community to see. You can find them here and here here.
Hopefully the referee will give the go ahead soon for their full publication in the journal MNRAS. We’ll keep you posted!
Hey why does the total keep changing?!
So we’re well on our way now to our target of 1 million clicks in 100 hours. Not that we want to get complacent though – keep classifying everyone!
Being part of Galaxy Zoo gives me the opportunity to combine web technologies with science, a perfect mix! When we came up with the idea of the Zoonometer™ we decided that if possible we’d like the total to update in near-relatime. We launched the Zoonometer™ with it auto-updating every 10 seconds but quickly realised with the sheer number of people coming to Galaxy Zoo, this continual refreshing was causing the database to get pretty slow. So onto version 1.1 of the Zoonometer™. We’re now caching the count and recalcualting the total every minute and I’m pleased to say we’ve significantly lowered the load on the servers.
One side effect of this caching however is that if you refresh the browser you might hit one of the other webservers which has its own internal cached value. There’s nothing funny going on I promise but you sometimes might see the Zoonometer™ jump around a little.
Cheers
Arfon
24 hours in, 76 to go
After the first day of Galaxy Zoo’s 100 hours of astronomy challenge, the response has been excellent. The Zoonometer ™ stands just short of 330,000, so we’re on course and nearly a third of the way there. Of course, the first part is easy, but how will you all do over the long haul?
1 million classifications in 100 hours?
During the lifetime of Galaxy Zoo, we’ve been continually stunned by the response from you, the Galaxy Zoo community, to our requests for help. That said, we thought it was about time we raised the bar and gave you an actual target to aim for, and the International Year of Astronomy’s showpiece event, the 100 hours of Astronomy is the perfect excuse.We’re challenging you to complete 1 million clicks in Galaxy Zoo 2 during the 100 hours. They actually started at midday Greenwich Mean Time, so we’re already underway – as you’ll see if you go to the site to observe our new Zoonometer ™
So if you need a little extra excuse to spend more time on the site this weekend, to drag your friends to Galaxy Zoo, or just a little extra motivation (watching the classifications tick up is very relaxing) then you now have no reason to wait. Get clicking!
Galaxy Zoo 