I’m giving a public talk about Galaxy Zoo and citizen science tomorrow (Monday) night. If you happen to be in or near Southern Illinois then you can find details here.  Otherwise you can watch online either below or, if that doesn’t work, here. It kicks of at 7pm Central time, which is 1am BST or 12pm GMT. Streaming Video by Ustream.TV

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Hi all,

The fourth Galaxy Zoo paper has now been submitted for peer review to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The paper describes a sample of blue early-type galaxies (ellipticals) found by you guys and compares them to their much more common red counterparts. We’ll make the paper available for download as soon as possible. Since the paper contains some interesting results, we would like to wait until we get the first referee report before making the draft available to the community.

In the meantime, have a look at the footnote on page 1:

Now we have to wait for MNRAS to send the paper to a referee and await her/his report.

In other news, we’ve gotten back the referee report for the second paper (Lintott et al.), which has been very kind and we’re currently discussing the revised version. Hopefully that’ll mean that the second Galaxy Zoo paper will be accepted soon!

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Great news, Hanny’s Voorwerp, the mystery blob found by Hanny, has made it to Astronomy Picture of the Day!

http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap080625.html

This is a fabulous success for all of us as the Voorwerp continues to intrigue…

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This is now the second time that Galaxy Zoo got slashdotted. Hooray!

http://science.slashdot.org/science/08/06/22/1757215.shtml

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We’re making progress in working on the Kitt Peak images of overlapping galaxies (encouraged by recently learning that we have 3 more nights this November, so keep those candidates coming in!). Now that various meetings and proposal deadlines are over, there’s some time to show off color composite images and point out some of the things we’re looking at. For most of these galaxies, we took images in two filters - the B band (blue), which lies between the SDSS u and g filters, and the I filter, which used to stand for infrared but nowadays (with the proliferation of genuine infrared imagers at much longer wavelengths) we think of as a red just a bit too deep for our eyes to see. Making a color image takes three filters, not just two. Fortunately, the colors of most galaxies are so well-behaved that we can synthesize the middle filter (green) from the two we have; this is something done pretty often with Hubble images as well. I then pasted the three colors together using a brightness mapping that is logarithmic starting slightly below the sky-brightness level and consistent across the various galaxies - this ends up much like the familiar SDSS color display. But enough of the details - let’s get to the galaxies.

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