It was a year ago today…
That this press release hit the web. Kevin, Kate and I spent the morning of the 10th July 2007 at <a href="Science Oxford, who’d agreed to host an event for us. A local school providing a clutch of willing sixth formers and we spent a few hours classifying galaxies with them, alongside Christine McGourty and the BBC cameras were there aiming to produce a piece for the 6 o’clock news.
Sadly we didn’t make it – I think it was a report on why the Sun isn’t causing climate change that beat us to the punch – but we did get a phone call asking me to go on the next morning’s Today program and the rest is history. I’m going to write more tomorrow as the 11th is the true birthday as far as I’m concerned, but if you’d told me a year later we’d be where we are – HST time, four papers submitted, this many people involved and this much fun – I’d have thought you were mad.
Here’s to our second year, to Zoo 2 and to much more.
The forum is back online
You can find it up and running here. Thanks to Edd and Phil for restoring it!
Hubble, meet Galaxy Zoo. Galaxy Zoo, meet Hubble.
Regular blog readers will know that we were all hugely pleased to find out that our proposal to observe Hanny’s Voorwerp with Hubble was approved. This was especially welcome because we expected a very high oversubscription rate for next year – new and repaired instruments meant that there was pent-up demand for some kinds of observations which have not been possible for several years. Nearly 1000 proposals were submitted to the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). which managed a complex review process involving about 200 astronomers from all over the world (noting that Hubble is a cooperative project of NASA and the European Space Agency). Specialized panels of reviewers looked at various subfields of astronomy, comparing the likely scientific fruitfulness of a wide range of projects.This last week saw the deadline for the next step in preparing for next year’s Hubble observations – what’s known as Phase II. This uses software distributed by STScI to plan each operation in detail – every exposure, filter change, and minute telescope motion. The astronomer can find out whether reordering certain operations uses precious telescope time more efficiently, and whether the results can be improved by restricting the observations to certain orientations of the telescope or times of year. The software will also overlay requested fields of view on sky surveys such as Sloan images), a welcome reality check that you’ve told it to look in the right place. This stage also gives us a chance to see whether anything we’ve learned since the proposal was submitted in early March gave us reason to change any of our originally proposed measurements.
The Dreaming Spires
This is the second part of Alice’s adventures back in June. You can read the first part here. Done that? Then…
Second paper accepted
Just a quick note to let you know that the second Galaxy Zoo paper has been accepted by the journal, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. This is particularly important as it’s the paper which contains the description of our technique and analysis, so getting this peer reviewed is immensely important.
Hopefully, we’ll be able to write more about what the referee wanted, but in any case I’ll get the new version online later this week. Coming up this week, our 1st birthday – details of Zoo 2 and our plans for the future, some exciting news about lenses and more about Alice’s trip to Oxford.
Chris Meets the Zoo
Galaxy Zoo Get-Together No. 4 – Chris’s RAS Lecture in London
Greetings to all looking forward to Zoo II, and welcome to a taste of its progress. I’d like to invite you on a journey with me in spirit, to Oxford, where I went on Wednesday 11th June. I visited Chris and Kevin at their zookeeper headquarters and had a go at classifying galaxies with a lot of bits of paper and some very thought-provoking buttons.
Public talk – online
I’m giving a public talk about Galaxy Zoo and citizen science tomorrow (Monday) night. If you happen to be in or near Southern Illinois then you can find details here. Otherwise you can watch online either below or, if that doesn’t work, here. It kicks of at 7pm Central time, which is 1am BST or 12pm GMT. http://www.ustream.tv/flash/live/222488Streaming Video by Ustream.TVhttp://www.ustream.tv/IrcClient.swf
Fourth Paper Submitted: Lots of Blue Ellipticals!
Hi all,
The fourth Galaxy Zoo paper has now been submitted for peer review to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The paper describes a sample of blue early-type galaxies (ellipticals) found by you guys and compares them to their much more common red counterparts. We’ll make the paper available for download as soon as possible. Since the paper contains some interesting results, we would like to wait until we get the first referee report before making the draft available to the community.
In the meantime, have a look at the footnote on page 1:
Now we have to wait for MNRAS to send the paper to a referee and await her/his report.
In other news, we’ve gotten back the referee report for the second paper (Lintott et al.), which has been very kind and we’re currently discussing the revised version. Hopefully that’ll mean that the second Galaxy Zoo paper will be accepted soon!
Hanny's Voorwerp is Astronomy Picture of the Day (APOD)
Great news, Hanny’s Voorwerp, the mystery blob found by Hanny, has made it to Astronomy Picture of the Day!
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080625.html
This is a fabulous success for all of us as the Voorwerp continues to intrigue…
Hanny's Voorwerp gets Slashdotted
This is now the second time that Galaxy Zoo got slashdotted. Hooray!
Galaxy Zoo 