Universe Today recently announced their Top 10 Scientific Endeavours of 2008, as voted for by their readers.

The Galaxy Zoo team were very pleased to find that Galaxy Zoo, and more specifically the discovery of Hanny’s Voorwerp, came in at number 8. This puts us in such fine company as exoplanet imaging, the Phoenix Mars Lander and the Large Hadron Collider!

Universe Today’s previous story on the Voorwerp is available here.

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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 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.  

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If you’re a regular user of the forum at http://www.galaxyzooforum.org/ you’ll notice that it’s currently offline. There’s been a sizeable server outage which has affected it (along with many other websites), and we hope it will be back up soon - but this outage is out of our control. We were actually already planning to transfer it to a new server anyway, and we were hoping to do this on Tuesday, although this downtime may unfortunately get in the way of our plans. If the forum does come back up in time, we may take it down for Tuesday in order to make this transfer, but it should be back up shortly after that. Please bear with us until we can get everything back up and running properly!

Update: Forum is still down unfortunately, but the support staff at the hosting site are working hard to bring it back up. It looks like the transfer will be delayed - and hopefully we’ll be able to give some warning of any resulting downtime from that.

Update 2: (Wednesday morning) Unfortunately there’s been hardware issues as the support technicians tried to bring the server back up. They’re still working on bringing it back up - no estimate for when this will take place I’m afraid.

Update 3: (Thursday morning) We’re in the process of trying to reinstall the forum framework and content back on the original server. A temporary forum is in place. It is not organised in the same way and has a different theme to emphasise this fact, and no posts there will be retained (except maybe in rare cases).

Update 4: (Wednesday morning - 11th June) The disk holding the forum is with a data recovery team, but unfortunately they won’t be able to get anything off for approximately another week at the earliest.

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We’ve all read the story of Hanny’s Voorwerp, and about two weeks ago we were lucky enough here in the UK to have the Voorwerp’s discoverer come and visit us again, meeting some of the team and catching up with some fellow volunteers at another Galaxy Zoo meetup. Read more

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