Galaxy Zoo meeting is over
With the help of coffee and biscuits, we’ve managed to get through the afternoon and the meeting is now over… to be continued in the pub in a few minutes.
Observing round up
If you’ve arrived via the Galaxy Zoo newsletter, you’re probably wondering where the posts about our observing trip are. They’re here:
Bill started things off by writing about our quarry for this Zoo-inspired hunt.
I then got excited about where we were, and about our first images. And about the telescope.
Later in the run we were seeing more and more perfect pairs, all of which will help us track down the galaxies’ dust.
Despite a few problems we pressed on, and started to produce colour images for the first time.
Since we got back, work has continued – and I’ll leave it to Bill to give you the latest.
Join us online tomorrow
The UK based Galaxy Zookeepers are gathering in Oxford tomorrow to discuss, among other things, our plans for Zoo 2, and you can join us (virtually) via UStream. We’ll start around 10 am BST tomorrow, and the stream will be on throughout the day, and you’ll be able to view an archive after the event too.
Another Zoo meetup, and a Zoo celebrity meets some of the team
We’ve all read the story of Hanny’s Voorwerp, and about two weeks ago we were lucky enough here in the UK to have the Voorwerp’s discoverer come and visit us again, meeting some of the team and catching up with some fellow volunteers at another Galaxy Zoo meetup. Read More…
Dude, where's my Mars Polar Lander?
Remember the Mars Polar Lander? It was a mission sent to Mars and land at its South Pole but was lost during the landing. The engineers don’t quite know why it failed and would like to know to avoid similar crashes in the future. To do that, they’d love to see the wreck left behind (if any).
The folks from the HiRISE camera onboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter have put high resolution images of the area on Mars taken by HiRISE where they think MPL crashed on their blog hoping that people will spot the wreck. It seems that human brains once more might beat modern computers when it comes to pattern recognition tasks. Want to give them a hand? Go here to download the images. If you do find it, remember to classify it “Star/Don’t know”.
There’s a nice news story about it in Nature here which also mentions Galaxy Zoo and has some comments from me.
The Story of Galaxy Zoo
Some of you on the forum might remember Devin Powell asking to interview some of you to write the story of Galaxy Zoo. The resulting article is now online here. It’s a wonderful piece:
Amateur Hour
In a modern twist on the centuries-old tradition of the backyard astronomer, thousands of galaxy gazers around the world have plugged in to become keepers of the Galaxy Zoo.
http://www.krieger.jhu.edu/magazine/sp08/f1.html
Enjoy!
Edit: the magazine cover is wonderful too!
http://www.krieger.jhu.edu/magazine/sp08/cover.html
NGC 3314 gets a counterpart
Not that I’m about to change my avatar or anything, but I think this is one of the best pairs we observed from Kitt Peak. First pointed out in the Galaxy Zoo forum by GwydionM, this features a face-on spiral almost exactly in front of an edge-on spiral. Like NGC 3314, it gives a rare chance to see the dust content of a galaxy almost all the way from outer regions to the nucleus (limited there by the accuracy with which we can extrapolate the profile of the background galaxy inward). This also drives home a point which isn’t always obvious from pictures, and is especially insidious when looking at books where the pictures tend to be all about the same size. Similar-looking galaxies can span a wide range of sizes, even among spirals which don’t come as small and faint as spheroidal or irregular galaxies. We don’t yet have good redshifts for both; the Sloan data give the single value z=0.067 for what must be the blended light of both, probably meaning that they are at similar redshifts so the size comparison in this picture is pretty close to reality. This image come from the first fruits of the next stage in processing our data, one which leaves them ready to analyze. To sample red light, we used an I filter rather similar to the SDSS i band. For the particular CCD we used, the skyglow that it sees causes a pattern of interference fringes from light reflecting within the chip. This can be calibrated and subtracted only using data on the night sky itself. We combined images where the target galaxies were at different places on the detector while rejecting objects that were at a certain pixel value only once (that is, things on the sky) to leave, ideally, only the interference pattern. I’m still tweaking until we decide that we’re close enough to that ideal… 
If you look closely, you can spot the heavily reddened core of the background galaxy behind the spiral arm to the lower right of the foreground galaxy core, and note the darker absorption next to those spiral arms. (I’ll be watching to see how this image shows up – this is the first time the regular Zookeepers let me have the keys to the blog, and I’m feeling my way around. It looked sort of odd in preview).
What we've actually been doing
As our last night on the mountain draws to an end, we’re fighting strong winds and occasional technical glitches in the camera control system (solution : turn off, turn back on again) to get images of some of the most useful galaxies we’ve seen yet. One is a more distant version of Bill’s personal touchstone, NGC 3314. I hope you’ve enjoyed the blogs we’ve posted over the last five nights – there will be more to come as the work on all of this fabulous data continues However, you’d be forgiven if you failed to work out from the posts what it is that has been keeping us, or rather Anna in particular, so busy. Read More…
Dust gets everywhere
The whole point of the observing run is to try and understand dust in external galaxies, but we’ve already encountered dust in the Milky Way, and producing spectacular sunsets and tonight I observed another manifestation of dust – the zodiacal light, subject of Brian May’s thesis.
You can see it in this picture from the all sky camera, as the glow over on the right.
The glow is from light reflected off dust in the plane of the solar system, the left overs from the process that produced the planets. This was a particularly good display, reaching almost up to the zenith. It’s the best display I’ve ever seen, having dashed out into the wind. The wind is the major feature of tonight’s observing so far, being strong enough to force us to point the telescope away from it, and loud enough to cause the dome to creak and moan. All a little disturbing, but apart from that conditions seem good.
Galaxy Zoo 