We’re happy to announce that we recently made all the classifications from the Galaxy Zoo: UKIDSS phase of the project public with a short paper (arxiv link) describing what’s available. 

At Galaxy Zoo, we are really committed to making your classifications open access and publicly available. We want to do this to maximise the science output from all of your work. However, as we’re a pretty small science team, sometimes it takes us a bit longer than other times. In this case it’s 10 years since we showed the UKIDSS images on the site, but we hope it’s better late than never for releasing this sample, which,  as far as we can tell is the largest set of morphological classifications of galaxies images in the near infrared range of the spectrum. 

 We decided to publish Galaxy Zoo: Morphologies Based on UKIDSS NIR Imaging for 71,052 Galaxies as a “Research Note of the American Astronomical Society” (RNAAS, or “Research Note” for short); a relatively new (and completely open access) publication venue from the American Astronomical Society journals. The length of these “Notes” is very limited, and you are only allowed one figure, but it gets published very quickly once it’s ready, so it seemed ideal for this short notice of the classifications being made public. 

To read more about what UKIDSS is, and why we wanted to have the near-infrared galaxy images from it classified by you, you might enjoy this blog post explainer from 2013. We also talked about the UKIDSS images in this post from 2015 “Eight Years and Eight Different Types of Galaxy Images”. 

As always, thanks again for your classifications, and in this case, also for your patience in waiting for us to get them processed and out to the astronomical community for use.