As you can see, we woke up this morning, to find that the Space Telescope Science Institute — the organisation running the world’s most famous telescope, Hubble — have sent out their approval and denial letters for the next cycle of observations with the Telescope. Our proposal for observing the Voorwerp (led by Principal Investigator Bill Keel) was approved for 7 orbits. Getting time on HST is hard at the best of times, and this time round was particularly difficult. Hubble is currently waiting for a visit from astronauts to carry out a desperately needed set of repairs and upgrades, and every astronomer in the world wanted to be first in the queue once it’s back on top form. To give you an idea, more than 20,000 orbits were requested when there were only 3,500 of them to go round – and 7 of them now belong to Galaxy Zoo.

So when will you see a gorgeous Hubble image of the Voorwerp? Not for a while yet. First, the Space Shuttle has to successfully complete its final service mission to repair the Hubble and install new instruments. This is currently scheduled for October 8, 2008. After all the repairs are done and the spacecraft has been checked out thoroughly, we then have to wait for the Voorwerp to actually be visible on the sky for Hubble. All this will take at least several months more. And of course once the data is taken, we then have to reduce it first to produce a picture. Still, it will be a wonderful opportunity for us to learn more about what the Voorwerp is.

By coincidence, today’s the birthday of the Voorwerp’s discover. Happy birthday, Hanny – and enjoy your present from the Space Telescope Science Institute.

Late last year we hinted at a surprise present for you. We also asked you for your name if you didn’t mind it being published…

Well, here you are:

No journal would allow us to have an author list with more than 100.000 names on it. However, you are our collaborators and we wanted to acknowledge your contributions that made Galaxy Zoo possible. If you look at the first page of Kate’s accepted paper, you will see that we link to this page:

All papers that the Team are working on will have this link on them to acknowledge you. In the future, when we make the Galaxy Zoo data available publicly for other astronomers to use, we’ll also ask them to do the same when they publish their results.

So once again, a Big Thanks from the Team. You can download a full-resolution JPEG or PDF version of the poster at http://www.galaxyzoo.org/Volunteers.aspx.

We have just found out that the first Galaxy Zoo paper we submitted has been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. This is really exciting, and what is even better is that we were not required to make any revisions or corrections first! This is almost unheard of – so unheard of that it’s not listed as a possibility in Kevin’s outline of the peer review process in a previous post. We expected the anonymous referee to produce a report that commented, criticised, and quibbled about parts of the paper that they were not satisfied with. But we in fact received no report and it went straight to being accepted. Which means that the referee must have been very happy with what we had done. Hoorah!

It will hopefully be appearing in the online version of MNRAS in a month, then a little longer for printed versions. But there is no need to have a subscription to MNRAS to view the paper as the paper is also available publicly here (and we will be sure to keep the versions the same).

We will now be writing a less technical version of the paper for those interested – the idea is to make the results accessible to all the Galaxy Users. So this paper will have the same figures, data, etc. but with more clarification where necessary, less astro-jargon, and some extra reflection on the results. Watch this space!

I (Waveney) joined Galaxy Zoo a few months ago and was a relatively quiet soul, who didn’t do very much…

A month ago I was sitting at a computer, and in theory looking at job ads, when I saw Chris’s request – Merger Hunters Needed. I read what was wanted and thought it would be fun to do, but the method requested was awful. One of my part time businesses is running a small scale internet services company and I like writing code to do fancy things. So I offered to provide a web page to do the merger hunting. I was busy during the day, but in about 4 hours in the evening I got the first program working, put it on one of my websites on my server and let the world know via the forum and the blog. I became famous overnight. The next day, Chris wanted to raise awareness and offered to add it to the Zoo front page and send out the newsletter, I requested that the front page be changed, but that the newsletter should wait a couple of days (just in case).

The following day, I was getting a lot of favorable comments and Chris mentioned it in the Blog, and Alice put it on OOTD. A couple of people commented about performance – this initially perplexed me as the program had almost no impact on the server. Then I found a limitation in the SDSS server about repeated requests from the same address, and I realised that this was the cause of the problem. I re-wrote fetches of the data and wrote my first ever SQL to pre-fetch the necessary info from the server. No sign of the front page change.

Usage grew, comments came and I started adding features, those useful features that I wanted like Zoom, Back and direct searches of the forum, requests for Invert, and then grid lines, and and and. I also leant a lot more SQL. Chris requested I have a “Basic” display and an “Advanced” display – done within the hour – still no sign of the front page or newsletter.

Prompted by the speed that one Merger Checker was working, and following discussions with Chris, the system was extended with a lot more data for images with lower merger ratings from the original Zoo. This required a complete re-write of the underlying data management – it took a few hours. Usage grew – still no sign of the front page or newsletter.

I was seen at the Winchester gathering, had it been a month before I would have largely been an unknown – now I was infamous. Usage grew – still no sign of the front page or newsletter.

Usage was steady, but at current rate it was going to take several months to get useful answers, I wrote to Alice requesting it be on OOTD again as it would be months before Chris had the front page changed – what happened – the front page changed almost as I finished sending the message. Users grew, but the rate of image classifications, didn’t change much. Oh well we will have to wait and see. Still no sign of the newsletter.

On Wednesday just after 7pm I noticed a sudden jump in users – 1 or 2 was not usual, but 5 in an hour was unheard of, clicked the status again and it had gone up 5 more! I asked on the forum and somebody said the newsletter was out! The next couple of hours where frenetic as the Merger hunters climbed from 200 to 700, and 20,000 images were seen. I kept an eye on the server – it has handled that sort of load before, and it did this time the only casualty was a logging program that runs in the middle of the night, when the system is usually quiet…

As I write this what started as a quick 4 hours a month ago has become the leading use of my talents for the last few weeks. 1200 users have seen 200,000 images and all sorts of useful results are beginning to be found. Oh and I am still looking for work – anybody want an experienced system/network designer and/or real time programmer?

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.

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.

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. 

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…

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.