Bill’s been on his travels again, and will be blogging about the trip soon. In the meantime, where in the world is the GZ banner being proudly lifted aloft?

As we reported earlier this month, we’ve been awarded 75 ksec (or just under 21 hours) of Suzaku time. Suzaku is a Japanese-led space telescope that observes hard X-rays. Hard X-rays have the handy property of penetrating just about everything, even the most messy gas and dust that tends to collect in the centres of galaxies and around supermassive black holes. We’re pointing Suzaku and its instruments at IC 2497, the massive galaxy next to Hanny’s Voorwerp.  

There are two possible outcomes for this observation that we can think of: if we do detect some hard X-ray photons, then we know that there is still an active supermassive black hole in IC 2497 that’s illuminating the Voorwerp. It’s merely hidden behind a tremendous amount of gas and dust. If on the other hand we don’t pick up anything, then we can be sure that the black hole has stopped feeding, i.e. it has genuinely shut down. 

Usually, telescopes like Suzaku call for new observations every year or so to fill the next year. Our observations could therefore have been scheduled any time between later this spring and spring 2010. So we were extremely excited that our observations have been scheduled for the week of April 13th! That’s amazingly lucky! Barring telescope technical trouble or targets of opportunity (Look! A bright new unknown kind of supernova!), we’ll get our data sometime in April or May. Fingers crossed…

The first two editions of Galaxy Zoo 2’s Top Ten Galaxies produced a  shocking result. Sitting proudly on top in both cases was a completely undistinguished elliptical.Things are different now; a new entry to the chart has taken first place, and so we proudly present Galaxy Zoo’s new favourite galaxy :To encourage you to make friends with more galaxies, we’ll change the rules from here on in; we’ll only count galaxies which are favourited between top ten updates. Next time’s chart might look very different – and we might have a different number 1.

You get up, you login to the forums to check for messages. You then open another window and login to classify galaxies. Back and forth, forums and classifications, forever logging in twice.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you had all your galaxies and all our forum friends in one place?

We’re working to make that happen!

In the coming months the Galaxy Zoo classifications site (GalaxyZoo.org) and the Galaxy Zoo Forums (GalaxyZooForum.org) are going to adopt a shared login (for you tech heads, we’ll be using CAS). To make this happen smoothly we need your help.

If you do not have an account on the forums, you can stop reading now. If you are a forum user, please keep going.

About 2000 of you (and this includes me, so don’t feel guilty) have created a login on GalaxyZoo.org using one email address and on the GalaxyZooForum.org using a different email address. Can you do us a favor? Can you please make sure your accounts on both sites use the same email address? (And in case you forget, we will be emailing mismatched email holders later this week)

Here is how:

• Login to GalaxyZooForum.org and click on “Profile” and note what email address you have entered.
• Now login to GalaxyZoo.org and click on “Classify Galaxies” and then resist the temptation to classify the galaxy (okay fine, maybe pause to do 2 or 3 or 4 dozen), and then click on “Profile.” Check if your email on GalaxyZoo.org matches. If it doesn’t, please change your email on GalaxyZoo.org to match our email on GalaxyZooForum.org.

This is a Bad Example.

This is a Good Example.

Thanks in advance for all your help!

cheers,

Pamela

So far, Galaxy Zoo has been Slashdotted three times. It seems that by now, Galaxy Zoo has entered the web consciousness to such a degree that we get mentions like this:

 “I’m a physics teacher and have been wondering what ways it’s possible to get students to participate in or donate to real science projects. I encourage my students to help out with things like Galaxy Zoo (which has just released a new version) and to get them to install BOINC on their personal computers. Do Slashdotters out there have any other suggestions that would be appropriate for the 11-18 age range? Extra credit if you can think of a way that I can track their progress so that I can give them extra credit.”

The Zoo is growing – Building new exhibits, bringing in new animals, and making space for all of you to gather, talk and work. We actually can’t quite share all the cool new critters we’ll have on display.  What we can tell you is we are working to integrate the forums and science so that you only have to login once to get to both, and we are working to develop cool new toys for educators (teachers / Scout leaders / camp councilors) to help them use the Zoo to teach.

As we work to expand the Zoo, we want to know what you want to see!  What are your ideas? We are looking specifically for ideas that will help you learn more about the science you’re already doing so well.

If you are using Galaxy Zoo to teach or have ideas on how it can help you learn let us know! What would make classifying easier and what things are you doing on your own to improve your experience that we could build tools to make it easier? And if you are an educator, please tell us how you have already used the Zoo, and what you hope to do in the future. What are your needs?

For example, in the next year we we will be launching a new “Group Login” feature that will allow anyone working with a group of students to automatically create a set of logins for the students that they can later customize with their own usernames and emails. The group leader – the teacher or after school program leader – will have to see the classifications done by all the students and can use these classifications to teach statistics and astronomy.

We will also be pulling into your sidebars and the space beneath the classifications window a glossary of terms, links to more and more detailed background information about the science being studied and data sets being used. We will also be looking for ways to help you share your favorite objects (including eventually sharing them on sites like Facebook!)

These examples are a taste of some of the things we’ve come up with.  We also want to hear about what you’ve come up with. What do you need?  What do you think would be fun? How can we help make the Zoo better for you?

So, whether you’re using the Zoo for yourself or in your classroom, we’re asking everyone to share their ideas with us. Hanny is working to go through the forum to find the things you’ve already mentioned and she is looking for teachers who are already using the Zoo so we can learn about what they are doing and how we can make their lives easier. Pamela is working to collect these ideas, and with the help of the Galaxy Zoo Team, transform them into reality. So every time you think: “wouldn’t it be cool to have.” please contact Hanny via:   arkelhannyvan(at)gmail.com or Pamela at pgay(at)siue.edu and tell us your idea!

We’re both looking forward to working with each other, which is why we wrote this together, and to hearing from all of you!

Cheers,

Pamela L. Gay & Hanny Van Arkel

As I was doing a backup of the Zoo 2 database this morning I thought I’d do a quick count of how many classifications we’d had so far.  To my surprise we were only about 2000 short of the 15,000,000th.  So there I sat, at my laptop, waiting to see who’d get the honour of classification number 15,000,000.  As you might expect I didn’t have to wait very long before I had the answer…

The Zooite to make the 15,000,000th classification is newolder.  Thanks newolder for helping us past this major landmark!  I thought you might like to see which galaxy newolder was classifying at the time, and here it is:

Not that we check up on you (very often 😉 ) but I couldn’t help but check what classification newolder gave this galaxy.  You will be pleased to hear that they classified it as smooth, completely round and nothing odd.

15,000,000 classifications in less than a month is an amazing achievement.  Thanks again for all of your hard work.

Happy Classifying!

Arfon

The Galaxy Zoo Shop is now open for business offering some official ZOO merchandise. We are currently using Cafepress for the ordering, printing and distribution and  plan to add some more designs and other products as we go on.

If you have any queries about your orders etc — you will need to email Cafepress about it but I have found them to be very quick to respond to queries.

All profits will be used to support the work of the Zoo,  so if you feel like wearing the ZOO badge with pride check out the Zoo Shop at www.cafepress.co.uk/zooniverse

There’s a new addition to Galaxy Zoo today – inverted images.  As some of you may know, the Sloan images can be shown in either colour or inverted.

To switch to the inverted version of the galaxy just click on the link “Invert galaxy image”.  The inverted images can be useful in bringing out hints of structure that are otherwise hard to spot so we hope that you like this addition.

Happy classifying!

Arfon