Archive for the 'Alice' Category
Kevin’s 10 Weeks
Earlier this month Galaxy Zoo took part in the 100 Hours of Astronomy, which was extremely successful and enjoyable too! Since then, several zooites have remarked that it was great fun and a real inspiration to classify more. So just for today, we decided we’d like to have another go.
Galaxy Zoo was inspired by zookeeperKevin’s PhD thesis a few years ago. Trying to find those blue ellipticals, he was running a program separating spiral from elliptical. He classified 50,000 galaxies in one week. ZookeeperChris was later heard to say in a lecture: “A PhD student will classify 50,000 galaxies before telling you exactly what you can do with the other 850,000.” (The rest is history.) Among other units, this incredible achievement was given a name, “The Kevin-Week”.
Today is Kevin’s 28th birthday. To celebrate, Arfon has set us up a Zoonometer again for today. We have a very special target: How many Kevin-weeks can we collectively click our way to on Kevin’s birthday? Let’s find out.
Thank you all for your inspiration, and Arfon for his kindness and technical genius – and happy birthday Kevin!
15 comments
Galacticats?
Shortly after the Galaxy Zoo Forum was launched, Vanny diagnosed a serious condition among many users: Galaxyzooitis. Symptoms include red eyes and tiredness, a lack of interest in the real world, expecting to see mergers, asteroids and satellites in the sky, seeing galaxies whenever the eyes are closed, an inability to stop talking about galaxies (a secondary symptom of this is incomprehensibility and a new reputation for nerdiness in the family), and, finally, an enhanced ability to see (and classify!) galaxies in Earthly phenomena such as clouds, writing and coffee.
This led to a collaboration between myself and NGC3314, Georgia, Archi, Caro, Infinity, Milk_n_cookies, Paddy, Pat, Scaryitalian, Sophie 378 and Thornius, all of the Galaxy Zoo Forum. We have discovered a new class of galaxy, namely the Galacticat.
7 commentsGalaxy Zoo goes to Bristol part 2: Alice’s Talk
Following Alice’s talk in Bristol, we’ve got an audio recording of it available here.
11 commentsGalaxy Zoo Goes to Bristol
Slightly short notice, but if you’re in or near Bristol, UK, there are two Galaxy Zoo talks taking place this Friday, 23rd January. They’re at the Bristol Astronomical Society, but anyone is welcome to attend.
One talk will be Rick Nowell, about the peas – which are becoming a remarkably large topic; more here, here and here – and one will be me be talking about Galaxy Zoo generally. It’s a “club night”, which means that several speakers will cover various topics. There will be professional and amateur astronomers in the audience, and I hope some members of the public such as you, too. We’re still debating on whether to podcast it or not . . .
The address is Bristol Grammar School, which is next to Bristol University, very near the centre. It starts at 7:15 p.m. and is free. We’ll meet in the Sixth Form Club. Rick very kindly sent me this map – Bristol Grammar School is right in the middle of it: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/university/maps/precinct.html
Very many thanks to the Bristol Astronomical Society for inviting me along, to zookeeper Bob for letting me pinch a few of his SDSS-related slides, to all of you for posting fabulous pictures and being such keen and inspiring citizen scientists for the last 18 months and thus giving me so much to talk about, and to Rick for taking a lot of trouble to arrange these talks.
Hope to see you there!
10 commentsThe 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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