This is the first of the two blogs that are dedicated to our latest paper, that we already advertised here. The topic is fascinating, but quite tough to understand for the first time. Have patience and enjoy.

Every single high-school textbook that I come across has the spinning ice-skater story hidden somewhere in the section on the angular momentum. The main question is, how do ice-skaters manage to spin-up to these dazzling spinning velocities? The answer lies in carefully observing what they do: they spin up a little bit, by pushing with their legs and with their arms outstretched and then they spin-up by bringing their arms towards their bodies. The physics behind it is the conservation of angular momentum. You can watch an edifying Youtube video that incidentally include an ice-skater here.

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I’m delighted to confirm that this month’s Sky at Night will cover Galaxy Zoo. Patrick talked to Hanny earlier in the summer, and Bob, Kate and I spent some of last weekend talking in front of the cameras. We talked for more than an hour, and the team led by producer Jane Fletcher have spent the last week editing us down so that we fit within the programme. I have no idea what they’ve come up with, and am looking forward to seeing it.

There are many, many ways to get to watch this gem of televisual entertainment :

If you’re in the UK :

BBC One : Midnight, Sunday night (ie early Monday morning), repeated on Saturday 13th at 2pm on BBC Two.

BBC Four : Special EXTENDED edition (30 minutes instead of BBC one’s 20) : Tuesday evening at 7.30pm, repeated at 1.35am on Wednesday morning.

The show will also be available on the iplayer for a week after broadcast.

If you’re not in the UK :

The show will turn up on our webpage at a week or two after broadcast.

edited by Edd to update BBC Four broadcast time

I’ll let Anze tell you the story in more detail, but I wanted to point out that the 6th Galaxy Zoo paper is now available online.

We’ve decided to make this one public just before submitting it to the journal - you can find it here. Thanks, as always, for making this possible.

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…

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