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.