Come and Join Us!
When Alice and the Zookeepers asked if some of us would like to contribute to the Blog I thought I would use the opportunity to grab the attention of any newbies who wander this way and might wonder what all the fuss is about and why people are still clicking after a year of classifying.
Well here’s my story…
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Galaxy Zoo meetups in North America?
UPDATE: There are plans afoot for a California meetup on September 27th! Read about it on the forum, and go if you can!
One of the greatest things about Galaxy Zoo has been the real-life meetings it has inspired, and the friendships that have resulted from these interactions. Alice wrote two wonderful blogposts (1 and 2) about the first set of meetups, and there have been more since then.
So far, though, the meetups have all taken place in the UK (as far as I know – although they have been attended by people from continental Europe). Galaxy Zoo has a lot of volunteers in the rest of the world that have thus far missed out on the fun of a Galaxy Zoo meetup.Fortunately, the Galaxy Zoo forum has taken up the challenge by discussing potential North American Galaxy Zoo meetups. Garrett_cw posted a thread on July 18th. Since then, the thread has evolved and lots of great suggestions have been made. The trouble, of course, is that North America is a big continent – so we’ll need several meetups for all of us to meet.
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Liveblog: Jim Gunn on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
As Chris mentioned last Saturday, scientists from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have gathered in Chicago to review accomplishments and look ahead to the future. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is the project that provided all the images for Galaxy Zoo; but additionally, it has provided some of the most amazing results in astronomy over the past decade or so.
The final talk of the conference was given by Jim Gunn, an astronomer at Princeton who has spent most of the past 20 years guiding SDSS from its initial planning stages to today. Jim was an excellent choice to give the talk. Chris was in the audience too, and liveblogged the talk from his blog, so you can see how two people from the same audience interpret in the same talk.
Here is what I recorded during the talk yesterday:
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Give Peas a Chance
Hi Pea Hunters,
Kevin and I wanted to give you an update with where we are in our Peas investigation. We haven’t answered all of our questions, but from detailed inspections of their spectra, it appears that the Peas are a mixed bag. A large portion of them appears to be powered by star formation, and perhaps an equal number show evidence of an active central black hole. The details of what I’ve done so far are below. Feel free to chime in with any questions or suggestions you all might have! The first thing I did was look at all of the peas that were highly rated as Green in our Pea Picker hunt. When I plotted them against a sample of randomly selected galaxies of at similar redshifts, they do stand out. This first plot is a color-magnitude diagram. In my opinion its one of the most widely used of all plots astronomers can make. Practically, this is probably because only 2 images are necessary to make this plot, but also historically because we’ve found out plots like these can tell us so much (eg. the HR diagram).
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A really hard question
I’m sitting in the back of the third day of the conference here in Chicago, and a fairly animated question has just been asked of Changbom Park, who has been working with a set of galaxies classified by an automatic routine. (You can find some of their results in this paper). I’ll need more thinking time to properly blog the debate (and the responses we’re getting to Galaxy Zoo) there’s one quote which sums it up :
We don’t classify zebras as horses because they look the same – we use the colours.
The equivalent galaxy argument is whether we should classify according to shape (which we call morphology to confuse people) and then look at colour, as Steven does or whether a ‘true classification’ would take into account all the available information. The consensus seemed to be the former, but then I’m biased…
Science in Chicago
Greeting from a very sunny Chicago! Several members of the Galaxy Zoo team are here this week (Steven, Chris and Bob, along with various new additions) for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey Symposium: “From Asteroids to Cosmology”.
Handedness and the Zoo on the BBC
There’s a brief segment on BBC’s Science in Action programme on Galaxy Zoo in general and the handedness result (which many of you followed on the blog and helped with the bias study.). The mp3 will only remain on their website for a week, so go get it now!
Galaxy Zoo Poster Available
A few months ago we asked anyone who felt so inclined to record their name to be added to the image which is referenced in each and every Galaxy Zoo paper. It features more than 5000 zooites spread across a beautiful Hubble image of a (clockwise) spiral galaxy, and looks fantastic!
You can order the poster from the new Galaxy Zoo Online Shop.
It is 29.6″ x 21.0″ [750 x 530 mm] in size and printed on heavyweight, semi-gloss paper using superior dye inks.
The price is $17.99 [plus postage], which is is merely the cost price that Cafepress.com are charging to print it.
Why not check it out!
We are considering offering other Galaxy Zoo related goodies to coincide with the launch of Zoo 2 — so keep checking the Blog and Forum for updates.
The Zoo goes to Intech Planetarium
One of the things I cherish about the Galaxy Zoo Team is that they let me write publicly to encourage people to enter the realm of science. There’s an opportunity to do that this academic year at Winchester Planetarium. On the second Wednesday of each month, at 6:30 p.m., a guest speaker is giving an astronomy lecture, and I’m doing October 8th. Astonishingly enough, the subject is Galaxy Zoo!
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Science in the public eye
I’ve written a long piece on my personal blog about trying to do science when you’re a project as public as Galaxy Zoo is. It’s my opinion rather than the team’s, so I’ll leave it there but if you’re interested take a look and comment over there.
Chris
Galaxy Zoo 