Today’s guest blogger is Thomas J from the Galaxy Zoo forum.
My interest in astronomy goes back almost as far as I remember. I recall, after dinner with my grandparents one afternoon, my father sitting down and telling me about the Big Bang. I was amazed at the concept and my interest was piqued, although at the time, I didn’t really understand it. If I am totally honest, I understand it little more today! I should really say that, at that age, it was more of an interest in ‘space’ diluted with plenty of science fiction. After all, it’s much easier for a child to comprehend ‘Flash Gordon and the Mud Men’ than the angular separation of galaxies. I did, however, own a large hard back book on astronomy which I would read in bed almost every night.

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Today’s guest blogger is veteran forum member Geoff Roynon.

My interest in the night sky (and astronomy) goes back to the late 1950s when I was growing up in South Africa and we were blessed with dark skies. I soon learned to spot the Southern Cross and Orion and various other “star shapes” in the night sky. We also saw some of the early satellites going by overhead so this must have been 1958/59.

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When Alice and the Zookeepers asked if some of us would like to contribute to the Blog I thought I would use the opportunity to grab the attention of any newbies who wander this way and might wonder what all the fuss is about and why people are still clicking after a year of classifying.

Well here’s my story…
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Hi Pea Hunters,

Kevin and I wanted to give you an update with where we are in our Peas investigation. We haven’t answered all of our questions, but from detailed inspections of their spectra, it appears that the Peas are a mixed bag. A large portion of them appears to be powered by star formation, and perhaps an equal number show evidence of an active central black hole. The details of what I’ve done so far are below. Feel free to chime in with any questions or suggestions you all might have! The first thing I did was look at all of the peas that were highly rated as Green in our Pea Picker hunt. When I plotted them against a sample of randomly selected galaxies of at similar redshifts, they do stand out. This first plot is a color-magnitude diagram. In my opinion its one of the most widely used of all plots astronomers can make. Practically, this is probably because only 2 images are necessary to make this plot, but also historically because we’ve found out plots like these can tell us so much (eg. the HR diagram).
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My name is Ciaran O’Hare, I’m a sixth form student at The Cherwell School in Oxford and I came to the Oxford University Astrophysics department as part of my work experience for Year 12. I was set a task to complete of the course of the week, to sort through hundreds of e-mails from from the users of Galaxy Zoo about the unusual ring galaxies.

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