Chris and I are at the AAS meeting in St. Louis. Chris has been keeping up with the meeting on his blog, and we’ve both given talks about Galaxy Zoo. Everyone here is really excited about what we’ve been able to do with Galaxy Zoo - great job, everyone!

Last night, Chris and I held a Galaxy Zoo planning meeting while watching a St. Louis Cardinals baseball game. Here is a beautiful photo of where we were - Busch Stadium in St. Louis (click for a larger version):

Photo from Flicker user pdsphil

Here is a beautiful photo of Busch Stadium 3.2 times over:

Why is that significant?

We suddenly realized, looking up at the stadium, that this is how large Galaxy Zoo is.

The stadium holds about 45,000 people. At last count, Galaxy Zoo had 141,960 volunteers. Here are some other things that we are bigger than:

• The entire nation of St. Vincent and the Grenadines
• Chris’s hometown, twice over
• The entire student population of the Universities of Michigan, Illinois, and Texas, combined
• The Italian Army
• …and 30 American Astronomical Societies.

More suggestions?

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Just as we have all been examining and testing for merging galaxies within Galaxy Zoo, the folks at Hubble have released a catalog of beautiful pictures of 59 pairs of merging galaxies. Take a look at the images - some of them are really beautiful, and they make an interesting contrast with the SDSS images that Galaxy Zoo uses. The SDSS is a survey, so see everything we can see, and the Hubble Space Telescope is a queue-based observing telescope, meaning it gets images one-by-one of interesting objects.

Frank Summers, the visualization genius at the Space Telescope Science Institute, has produced some great animations to go with the merging galaxies catalog release. The animations really help you get a sense for how scientists go about using computer simulations to study merging galaxies. It’s a tricky business, because there isn’t a one-to-one relationship between where two merging galaxies start from and where they end up - mergers that look the same can result from vastly different circumstances. The best way to study mergers is to look at a lot of them to find similarities and differences - which is exactly what you’re doing with Galaxy Zoo!

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Several weeks ago, we issued a challenge: re-create the Galaxy Zoo poster in a new way to tell the story of Galaxy Zoo yourself. When I posted this, I wasn’t sure if anyone would find it interesting, but as always, your creativity is amazing. The first submission is in, from Julia, and it is breathtaking. Behold:

Julia’s Galaxy Zoo poster remix (1.2 MB JPG)

I think you’ll agree that this is a big improvement over the text-heavy original, and I think it’s one of the most amazing science posters I’ve ever seen. Congratulations to Julia on an amazing piece of science/art! (Julia, if you’re reading, please say hello in the Comments section.) If anyone else is interested in remixing the poster, send me a message in the forum (I’m zookeeperJordan).

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For the past few months on this blog, we’ve been talking about the science of Galaxy Zoo - what your millions of classifications have revealed to us about the way the universe works. Right now, as Steven and I described Friday and Monday, the members of the Galaxy Zoo team are writing papers announcing our science results, and offering feedback on each other’s papers.

But of course, Galaxy Zoo has become much more than just a science project. The site has become an Internet phenomenon, and for the next few posts, we’d like to focus on some other aspects of the Galaxy Zoo phenomenon. Today, we wanted to talk about the thing that makes everything else work - the site itself.

Without a good-looking and well-functioning website, we could have never invited all of you to participate in this project, and you could not have generated the excellent scientific dataset that you have generated. The site was designed by two professional web designers: Phil Murray and Dan Andreescu. Galaxy Zoo is now proudly listed as a featured project on Phil’s web site.

Phil designed the look and feel of the site, and Dan wrote the code that allowed the website to take your input and write it into a database of classifications. Dan left the project in late 2007, and Danny Locksmith has taken over the coding.

The best way to tell the story of Galaxy Zoo’s design is to let Phil and Danny tell the story themselves. So here is Phil, talking about how he designed the layout of Galaxy Zoo:

GZ1.0 Visual Design

I was asked by Chris Lintott to design the Galaxy Zoo logo and web site in March 2007, and I realised early on that this had the potential to be a hugely successful project — little did we know just how successful it would be! I was given a completely free rein to handle the visual design of both the logo and the web site.

The Galaxy Zoo Logo

I wanted to create a visually appealing logo that would work in several formats - web and print. It had to be flexible enough to work as a standalone logo or to be incorporated into an overall page design - as is the case with the web site. The graphic part of the logo is in fact based on a Hubble image of Supernova 1987A Rings, which seemed to fit very neatly into the text of ‘GALAXY ZOO’ to form an official logo. A variation was developed for both web and print use.

The Galaxy Zoo Web Site

It seemed obvious that part of the attraction of the GZ1.0 project to non-astronomers was the sheer beauty of the galaxy images, plus the fact that many of these images had never previously been seen by human eyes. So I wanted to maximise impact right up front on the Home Page of the site by using a large galaxy image as a main background to the page and to carry this theme through into the inner pages. I wanted all text to sit on a semi transparent screened background to give the impression of depth on the page.

Choosing a colour palette was relatively straightforward given the colours within the logo, hence the basic black, grey, orange and gold colour scheme. It was decided to go with a slightly shallower header graphic for inner pages with all top navigation shown horizontally and any secondary navigation to be contained in a left column (as is the case in the Analysis Page). I decided on a fixed width solution catering for a minimum screen resolution of 1024×768 pixels.

When it came to the buttons for the Galaxy Analysis page, I spent some time designing what I hoped would be generic buttons for the various options on offer (Spiral Galaxy - Anticlockwise, Clockwise and so on). The intention was to try to design buttons that would not influence the decision making of the Galaxy Zoo visitor but also that they would be intuitive to use. The feedback and data received as part of GZ1.0 has given us some valuable information about how to present these and other buttons for GZ2.0.

As for building the site, I constructed all the pages as HTML templates, which were then integrated into the ASP.Net web programming environment by the excellent Dan Andreescu. Danny Locksmith has taken over the ASP.Net duties since late 2007.

I think you’ll agree that the site that Phil did a great job - he created a really beautiful site that was easy to navigate. Now here is Danny, talking about how he took over the coding from Dan:

Most of the ASP programming was decided on before I got involved. My task so far has been to try to understand how someone else thought it should work!

In effect this is how it works:

Your login to the site, your user preferences, etc. are all controlled by the .NET 2.0 framework. The site uses a template that provides the basic logic involved in recording your clicks and ensuring that the right person is credited with each classification. The persistant data is stored in a database.

When you load the Galaxy Analysis page, a galaxy is selected randomly and displayed on the page. Next to the galaxy’s image is a the Galaxy ID, which is a hotlink to an SDSS page where you can view details of the galaxy - its spectrum and a zoomable picture, etc. Watch for changes to this in GZ2!

Next to the galaxy image is a custom control which has the various buttons you can click to classify the galaxy. Since we learned about the anticlockwise bias, various theories have been put forward about to explain it - one of them is the design and layout of these buttons. Another problem here was that people tended to click the button several times, recording several results. This was worked around by only allowing one classification per galaxy. Yet another potential problem was that you could easily make an error, but you could not go back and fix it. Look for changes in GZ2!

Once you click a button, your classification, your user ID, the date and time, etc. are recorded in a database. The data that is stored was designed to answer specific questions, and the scientific papers which are to be published soon. With the advent of the bias testing phase, additional information was stored in the same database - the way the image displayed had been transformed.

In GZ2, the data collected will be more generic, and will create a very comprehensive catalog of galaxy information, almost certainly the biggest ever. To a great extent, the inner workings of the site are defined by the various scientists involved in the project. It is very much designed by the entire team, and as such my task is to ensure that the finished site meets all the goals of the team, and at the same time is pleasureable to navigate and to use.

You will be able to decide if I was successful when GZ 2 is launched!

I’ll add just two things to what Phil and Danny said:

1) The servers that run Galaxy Zoo are in the Physics and Astronomy building at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. (Here is the building in Google Maps - the Johns Hopkins lacrosse stadium is just to the north, and the building across the winding street is the Space Telescope Science Institute).

2) One of the things I find amazing about Galaxy Zoo is that no member of the team has ever met all the other members face-to-face. Chris has come closest - he has met everyone except Jan and Alainna, who do IT support for the servers at JHU. In addition, 8,549 km separates Anze in Berkeley, California from Chris, Kate, and Kevin in Oxford. The Galaxy Zoo team could not have existed without the Internet, and communication tools that allow us to work together productively on different continents.

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As Steven mentioned in his post last Friday, we are hard at work on the first round of papers from Galaxy Zoo. Back when we started this blog, Chris listed the four papers that we expect to come out in the first round. To review them:

1) A paper summarizing the structure of Galaxy Zoo, with details of how we turn your clicks into a catalog of galaxies. Chris is the first author on this one, and Anze talked here on the blog about how we got our catalog of galaxies. Chris’s talk at the AAS meeting also gives a good introduction to what is likely to go in this paper.

2) A paper about the relationship between what a galaxy looks like and where it lives. Steven is the first author on this one, and he wrote about the results very clearly here.
3) A paper about the unusual “blue ellipticals” that you found. Kevin is the first author on that one, and he wrote about it here, with lots of really nice sample images.

4) A paper examining the structure of the universe by studying the rotation direction of galaxies. Kate is the first author on this one, and Anze is working closely with her. She wrote about the reasons for the study on the forum, and her paper will also include the results of the bias study. The bias study showed that the apparent excess of anti-clockwise galaxies seems to be a result of people’s perception of galaxies on the site, rather than any feature of the galaxies themselves or our position relative to them. We actually never expected to find any excess - and often in science, disproving a result is just as important as finding a new result.

Steven’s post Friday did a great job of describing what goes on in writing a scientific paper. Here, I’ll talk about what it’s like to read over a paper and provide comments to the first author.

The results so far have been really interesting, and it’s been a lot of fun to see them written down. I looked through Chris’s paper in detail, since I know a good deal about the process by which we created Galaxy Zoo, and the SDSS data on that Galaxy Zoo uses. I know less about the astronomy, so I’ve just skimmed through Steven and Kate’s paper. I haven’t seen Kevin’s yet.

We’ve been exchanging drafts of the papers as PDFs, then sending comments back to the first authors by E-mail. I’ve been reading along and making notes as I go. I’m trying to make sure that everything would make sense to an astronomer who hadn’t worked with Galaxy Zoo before.

One of the most important parts of any scientific paper is the figures. The old statement that “a picture is worth a thousand words” is definitely true in science, but in this case the pictures are usually plots of data. I’m checking over the figures to make sure the x and y axes are clearly labeled and the figure caption makes sense. A lot of readers read the figures first, then come back to the text, so the figure captions should make sense when read apart from the paper. The way that figures can depict scientific data is quite interesting, and creating figures for professional astronomers is frequently quite a different visual style from creating figures for the public.
The last section of any science paper is the References - the previous papers that this paper builds on. Any assertion that you make in a paper should either be a direct result of your study, blindingly obvious, or referenced in a standard style. So, when Chris talked about how images from Galaxy Zoo were generated, I sent him a reference on how we take individual black-and-white images in different wavelengths and combine them into a color image.

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