Want to work for Galaxy Zoo?
If you happen to have a PhD – in any subject – and would like to help us continue the Galaxy Zoo adventure, then there’s a job advert on the Oxford Physics site that might interest you.
Google helps out Galaxy Zoo
As this story announced on Thursday, Galaxy Zoo has been given a grant of $50,000 by Google. As Bob says “The Google grant will enable us to add two key features to Galaxy Zoo. We will incorporate ‘GoogleSky’ technology into the website so it resembles the Google Maps interface. Then we will put Galaxy Zoo into the Google Sky and Google Citations Pros interface which will allow people to zoom around the universe, click on any galaxy and classify it more easily.”
It’ll take us a while to get there but this should make classifying a lot more fun, and hopefully allow us to do all sorts of exciting things.
eGZeLENS — The extensive Galaxy Zoo LENsing Survey
We’ve go exciting news; Galaxy Zoo has gotten time on our largest telescope
yet, the enormous 8m Gemini South telescope…
Hi there
Some of you may have had some interaction with me on the GalaxyZoo Forum on the topic of Gravitational Lenses. My name is Aprajita Verma and I am a researcher at the University of Oxford. I primarily work on galaxies at high redshift trying to understand their nature as we see them, how they began their lives and postulating about their fate.
The State of the Zoo
I was going to write another history post about the early days of the zoo to mark today’s anniversary. After all, it was around now – 9.30am – on July 11th that I realised just what we’d done, as our server went down under the pressure and email after email after email arrived in our inbox complaining about it – or helpfully pointing out that we had technical problems. For someone who thought that this project might be a spare time occupation it was a rude awakening and the story of the last year has in some sense been a struggle to catch up.
Beta-Testing Zoo 2
The serenity of the dreaming spires was somewhat shattered in the Denys Wilkinson building where Chris and Kevin work. Chris’s phone rings randomly when nobody’s calling him, I was defeated in a fight with the coffee machine, and the spirit of headless chickens prevails! The walls, nonetheless, are lined with galaxy pictures. The offices’ doors and walls are mostly made of glass; Chris’s looks like a greenhouse whose plants are books and papers and Post-It notes, and on one of his walls is a nearly-empty bottle of gin, professionally upside down like you get in a bar. Kate used to sit on the right, and Kevin’s office is two doors down. I was pleased to meet Ciaran, the work experience student who wrote our ring galaxies post, and to watch Chris drawing some scary formulae for him on the whiteboard which is part of his office door.
Credit: Neha
It was a year ago today…
That this press release hit the web. Kevin, Kate and I spent the morning of the 10th July 2007 at <a href="Science Oxford, who’d agreed to host an event for us. A local school providing a clutch of willing sixth formers and we spent a few hours classifying galaxies with them, alongside Christine McGourty and the BBC cameras were there aiming to produce a piece for the 6 o’clock news.
Sadly we didn’t make it – I think it was a report on why the Sun isn’t causing climate change that beat us to the punch – but we did get a phone call asking me to go on the next morning’s Today program and the rest is history. I’m going to write more tomorrow as the 11th is the true birthday as far as I’m concerned, but if you’d told me a year later we’d be where we are – HST time, four papers submitted, this many people involved and this much fun – I’d have thought you were mad.
Here’s to our second year, to Zoo 2 and to much more.
The forum is back online
You can find it up and running here. Thanks to Edd and Phil for restoring it!
Hubble, meet Galaxy Zoo. Galaxy Zoo, meet Hubble.
Regular blog readers will know that we were all hugely pleased to find out that our proposal to observe Hanny’s Voorwerp with Hubble was approved. This was especially welcome because we expected a very high oversubscription rate for next year – new and repaired instruments meant that there was pent-up demand for some kinds of observations which have not been possible for several years. Nearly 1000 proposals were submitted to the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). which managed a complex review process involving about 200 astronomers from all over the world (noting that Hubble is a cooperative project of NASA and the European Space Agency). Specialized panels of reviewers looked at various subfields of astronomy, comparing the likely scientific fruitfulness of a wide range of projects.This last week saw the deadline for the next step in preparing for next year’s Hubble observations – what’s known as Phase II. This uses software distributed by STScI to plan each operation in detail – every exposure, filter change, and minute telescope motion. The astronomer can find out whether reordering certain operations uses precious telescope time more efficiently, and whether the results can be improved by restricting the observations to certain orientations of the telescope or times of year. The software will also overlay requested fields of view on sky surveys such as Sloan images), a welcome reality check that you’ve told it to look in the right place. This stage also gives us a chance to see whether anything we’ve learned since the proposal was submitted in early March gave us reason to change any of our originally proposed measurements.
The Dreaming Spires
This is the second part of Alice’s adventures back in June. You can read the first part here. Done that? Then…
Galaxy Zoo 