Of the many things that the Zooniverse produced this year (2010 was a busy one!) a highlight for me were the Zooniverse limericks over on the Galaxy Zoo forum. For Day 17 of the advent calendar I have picked out a few of my favourites. Crowd-sourced and often puntastic.

From DJJ on the influx of spammers in October:
]When spammers invade our vicinity,
Two zooites, the one called Infinity,
The other called Alice
(I won’t say with malice)
Despatch them, and earn zoo divinity.

From Budgieye on an infrared quasar in the SDSS:
From the edge of our space-time, it shrieks
“I’m a quasar”, then Expansion tweaks
its Lyman UV,
redshifted, to be
a whisper of infrared peaks.

From DJJ on Pluto’s demise:
When Tombaugh had managed to scan it,
They christened it Pluto — a planet,
But in twenty-o-six
With their ‘dwarf planet’ fix,
The IAU voted to can it.

From DJJ (again! There a lot of great DJJ limericks) on Galaxy Zoo Hubble vs Zoo 2:
I don’t half miss the SDSS,
Where the edge-ons were sexy, no less;
Here it’s clusters of clumps,
Or hoops with the mumps —
And some edge-ons are simply a mess!

Finally a defence from Zooite Jules, who is often taken for a man thanks to her forum name:
So many have thought me a bloke
In fact it’s become quite a joke
But those who I’ve met
Will vouch for me yet
I’m a LADY. Tis true! Ask these folk!!

There are plenty more on the enormous limericks thread!