My colleagues and I are happy to say that the eleventh Galaxy Zoo paper has now been submitted to the journal Astronomy Education Review. The paper is called “Galaxy Zoo: Exploring the Motivations of Citizen Science Volunteers,” and the authors are myself, Georgia Bracey, Pamela, and Chris, Phil, Kevin, Alex, and Jan of the original Galaxy Zoo team. In addition to being the eleventh paper overall, it is also the first paper to study the Galaxy Zoo volunteer community – that is, you!

We are grateful for your collaboration with us even more than usual, because for this paper, you not only classified galaxies, but some of you agreed to give a half-hour of your time to participate in an instant message or phone interview.

As with all the other papers, this paper is being sent out by the journal’s editors to one or more anonymous “peer reviewers” – practicing education researchers who read the paper and recommend that the journal either accept or reject the paper, or (most commonly) request that the authors resubmit the paper after making some improvements. The process can sometimes go a few cycles of changing and resubmitting before the paper is finally accepted. This peer review process helps ensure that scientific studies meet quality standards as judged by the community.

You might have noticed that I haven’t talked about this research on the blog yet, as other team members have done with their research. I wish I could have shared more, but there was an important reason for saving all the explanation until after the paper was submitted. It is well-known in social science research that if the group being studied is aware of the study results, all sorts of unpredictable things can happen.

However, now that the study is over, we can and will gladly share our results. I’ll do that in a series of posts, first by giving a quick summary of what we found, then writing about the ethics of conducting research with people, then about ways to avoid bias in social science, and finally posting a detailed explanation of what we found in the study and what it means.

Now for the quick summary: based on our interviews, we identified 12 motivations that volunteers have given for participating in Galaxy Zoo – 12 reasons why people like you participate. These 12 reasons are:

We included these motivations in an online survey that many of you took (thanks!), and we are now analyzing the results of that survey to find out which motivations are common and which are rare.

Knowing your motivations for participating will be greatly helpful to us and to other citizen science projects by helping us understand you better. As we understand what appeals to you about Galaxy Zoo, we can design future Zoos to meet those needs and wants. So, this research is helping us create the best Zoos we can create for you.

I really enjoyed doing the interviews, and going through all your forum responses. It’s clear that many of you have many different reasons for being a part of Galaxy Zoo, and many different and eloquent ways of expressing your reasons. A few of the reasons that you gave as part of the forum discussion stuck out in my mind. One of you said “just knowing how small you are is something that’s really hard to explain.” Another said “getting to know, at least a little, some fans and professionals in the GalaxyZoo community.” Another of you said “I’m so proud to be with You, the whole project, to be a part of something bigger than wars or politics. Because science and discovering the truth are the only things that matter.” And there were many, many others.

It’s been a real pleasure getting to know so many of your reasons for being a part of this great enterprise we call Galaxy Zoo, and we’re looking forward to continuing to work with all of you!

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The AAS meeting just ended, and in a few minutes I’ll be giving Lucy from the Zoo Education Team a ride to Caltech, which is just down the street. Georgia sent me some photos from the three Galaxy Zoo education posters that we presented here.

Here is my poster, describing the irregular galaxies project:

Here is Pamela’s poster describing the results of our survey into the reasons you participate in Galaxy Zoo:

And, last but not least, here is Georgia’s poster describing our plans for future user testing of the Zoo 2 website:

It was a very successful meeting, and a lot of people came by the poster to ask questions or share their own results.

I’m headed back home at 11 PM tonight. It’s been a great trip, but I’m looking forward to going home!

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The press conference is about to start. The topic of the press conference is the U.S. International Year of Astronomy program. Pamela is the lead for the New Media team, so she is representing the team as one of the four participants. The participants are:

-Doug Isbell, US IYA 2009 chair
-Steve Pompea, NOAO
-Connie Walker, NOAO
-Pamela, SIUE

The four panelists are sitting at an elevated table at the front of the room. I should mention that the International Year of Astronomy is a big deal here in Pasadena, home of Caltech - there are signs on Paseo Colorado, the main shopping area.

10:34 AM: The AAS’s Deputy Press Officer is introducing the Panel. Doug is described as the “SPOC” (pronounced Spock), the single point of contact for the U.S. program. Rick thanked Pamela for livecasting the press conference, and I do too. Thanks, Pamela!

10:36 AM: And so it begins, with Doug giving an overall introduction to the project. IYA has been endorsed by the United Nations, and 141 countries have active programs. One of the goals is to get millions of people to look through telescopes. Doug is also pointing out the International Secretary, Pedro Russo from ESO.

10:38 AM: Doug is talking about the IYA program. His slide has a screenshot of the U.S. House of Representatives endorsing a resolution in support of IYA. He also mentions 100 Hours of Astronomy, which many of you remember from the Zoonometer.

10:44 AM: Doug had an endearing typo on his slide - he listed the website as astronomy20009.org. Rick said, “Doug, we will not stick with this for 20,000 more years,” to great laughter, including Doug.

10:45 AM: Steve is now talking about the Galileoscope, a small telescope that has been built and is about to be sold. The design criterion for the telescope was that it must be able to see the rings of Saturn - from the beginning, they made all decisions with the rings of Saturn in mind. The Galileoscopes are now shipping, and are about to be sold for $15. These are small but high-quality telescopes, and $15 is an amazing price. Steve quotes Sky and Telescope in saying that they usually don’t recommend telescopes for under $200, but they were recommending this telescope for $15. It is a very cool project.

10:48 AM: There are 3 ways to use the Galileoscope - a 25x eyepiece, a 50x eyepiece, and a Galilean 17x eyepiece. The different lenses allow it to serve as an optics lab as well as a telescope. There are student activities called “In the Footsteps of Galileo” in which students make some of the same observations Galileo did, and also some activities on different types of lenses. He’s now showing a picture of the Moon that was taken through a Galileoscope, which is quite a good picture. And I should have mentioned earlier that Steve has a Galileoscope kit in front of him - I’ll try to post a picture of both the kit and the built telescope later.

10:55 AM: Next is Connie Walker from NOAO talking about Dark Skies programs, including the “Globe at Night” project, where volunteers make observations of the sky light levels and report them online. She says that about 2/3 of people in the U.S. cannot see the Milky Way.

10:57 AM: With all this in mind, Dark Skies was chosen as a cornerstone program of the U.S. IYA. The main project of the Dark Skies program is Globe @ Night (link coming soon). The program has been going on for a few years, but this has been their biggest year, with more than 15,000 observations taken. The average star magnitude reported is about 3 or 4 (more explanation of this coming soon).

11:02 AM: Connie is now giving an example of 3,400 measurements taken near the town of Granger, Indiana. They made a lego model of a map of their observations, where different colors of legos represented the faintest stars they could see from that spot. This is a very cool example of scientific visualization; I’ll try to find more details about it soon. Next, she’s showing examples from Norman, Oklahoma, where the program had the support of the mayor. There is a bright spot in the map - an area where it’s very hard to see the sky - that Connie says is the University of Oklahoma football stadium.

11:06 AM: For more information about dark skies, see www.darkskiesawareness.org

11:07 AM: Yay, Pamela is going next! Moving to a different thread.

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Happening soon here at the AAS meeting…

In a little over an hour, there will be a Galaxy Zoo press conference announcing to the community a new discovery that you have helped make. Many of you have heard about this one in the process of the research coming together, but it is an exciting result.

As always, Astronomy Cast LIVE will be broadcasting the press conference live from here in Pasadena. Here is the link to the live broadcast, which starts at 10:30 AM U.S. Pacific time:

Galaxy Zoo live press conference

During the conference, you will be able to chat, and someone will be on hand to answer any questions that you ask about the research.

After the press conference ends, we will save a recording of the broadcast and keep it available on the same site.

In case any of you have as much trouble as I do with converting time zones in your head (I have missed many a teleconference due to miscalculations), here is the time that it will appear in a major city hopefully near where you are (ordered east to west):

Sydney: 3:30 AM (0330)
Tokyo: 2:30 AM (0230)
Beijing: 1:30 AM (0130)
New Delhi: 11:00 PM (2300)
Moscow: 9:30 PM (2130)
Cape Town: 7:30 PM (1930)
Rome: 7:30 PM (1930)
London: 6:30 PM (1830)
New York: 1:30 PM (1330)
Chicago: 12:30 PM (1230)
Denver: 11:30 PM (1130)

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Hi all,

Chris, Pamela, and I will be at the American Astronomical Society meeting next week. As always, I will be liveblogging Zoo-related events at the meeting, and hopefully uploading a photo or two. We’ll be coordinating our coverage with some other bloggers; I’ll post the link to that coverage here tomorrow. And if any of you are in the L.A. area, send me a message on the forum - I would love to meet you.

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