Galaxy Zoo Blog

Finishing that paper II

The Galaxy Zoo AGN host galaxies paper is nearing the final draft stage.
Note to self: when converting a document from British to American spelling, do not just automatically replace all instances of `ise’ with `ize!’

Voorwerps everywhere

I’m delighted to announce that the fifth Galaxy Zoo paper – the one that discusses Hanny’s Voorwerp – has now been accepted for publication by Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

It’s somewhat of a relief to say that, as it was way back in August of last year that we first submitted it. The [...]

Questions about Cosmology?

A group of young cosmology researchers at the University of Portsmouth (where a number of Zoo people work) are trying to start a video podcast outreach project. The working title is “Our Universe” and the idea is that these would be short video podcasts, probably released on You Tube which will give some insight into [...]

Finishing that paper…

When you start to write a paper for publication, you generally think that it will take a fortnight, at most. Naturally, that’s almost always a highly optimistic estimate and it can take months to get a paper into shape for submission to a journal. 
I’m currently working on the Galaxy Zoo paper dealing with the host galaxies [...]

Eleventh Galaxy Zoo paper submitted!

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 [...]

Unveiling the Mass of Galaxies with Vera Rubin

This week I am attending a conference at Queen’s University in Kingston (Ontario, Canada) with I think the longest name I have ever seen. It’s called “A Celebration of Vera Rubin’s Life. Unveiling the Mass: Extracting an Interpreting Galaxy Masses.” I was very excited to attend this conference. Vera Rubin has always been a role [...]

Dust pathfinding with Galaxy Zoo

Now that spring classes are over, I’m catching up with lots of things. These include making color-composite images from our latest observations at the WIYN 3.5-meter telescope in Arizona done to follow up overlapping-galaxy pairs from the Forum. Here are three samples, showing how much more detail we can see with long exposures one the [...]

Pictures from AAS

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 [...]

Watch the AAS Citizen Science session now!

The International Year of Astronomy citizen science session at AAS is going on *right now*! Pamela’s team is live-streaming the session. You can see it at http://tinyurl.com/mmm5n4 .

Live from the AAS International Year of Astronomy Press Conference, part 2

11:08 AM: Pamela: “Galaxy Zoo takes long collaborator lists to a whole new level.” She’s showing a small sample of all the names from the Zoo 1 poster. Next, she’s talking about Zoo 2, and telling the story of 100 hours of astronomy challenge – 1 million galaxies in 100 hours. We thought this was [...]