Speaking of the long-awaited Hubble observations of Hanny’s Voorwerp – where are they? We know certain windows when each can be done, and is supposed to be carried out. One such week-long window has already gone by without getting data, so things are narrowed down a bit.
We have some new results to show off, Hanny’s Voorwerp observed using a space telescope. No, not that space telescope, that’s still coming up (shortly, we hope).
Soon after the initial results showed what a fascinating object Hanny’s
Voorwerp was proving to be, it was entered in the observing schedule for NASA’S GALEX satellite (GALaxy Evolution EXplorer). [...]
No, no one on the Zoo team has won the Nobel Prize. But there are interesting connection with the 2009 Physics prizes, just announced by the Swedish Academy. The prize was shared by Charles Kao, Willard Boyle, and Charles Smith. Kao’s work contributed greatly to making fiber optics feasible for reliable transmission of signals at [...]
A research conference on interacting and merging galaxies just concluded today, hosted by East Tennessee State University under the title “Galaxy Wars: Stellar Populations and Star Formation in Interacting Galaxies”. This is a favorite topic of many in the Zoo, and, as you might expect, Galaxy Zoo was represented both in presentations and in the [...]
Among the new data we have now is a set of fabulous images taken late last year from the 3.5m WIYN telescope at Kitt Peak, Arizona. We were using a special rapid-guiding CCD camera, which tracks rapid motion due to the atmosphere or wind shaking the telescope, delivering even sharper images than the telescope normally [...]
Attention cloud hunters! With a lot of input and assistance from laihro, waveney, and ZookeeperKevin, I am pleased to announce a new specialized galaxy hunt, targeted at galaxies with active nuclei to pull out the ones with bright clouds in an organized way. At
http://wavwebs.com/GZ/voorwerpje/Hunt.cgi
you can go through SDSS images of known AGN and help us [...]
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 [...]
With the excitement about new observations of Hanny’s Voorwerp, this might be a good time to point out that Zoo participants are finding new examples of a related (albeit less spectacular) class of objects. (That was evidently my roundabout way of saying “hey, everyone, you can look for these too!”). What do these four galaxies [...]
Cape Canaveral, Florida – The space shuttle Atlantis lifted off today after a nearly flawless countdown, beginning an 11-day mission to refurbish and repair the Hubble Space Telescope for the final time. That’s how a news story would report it. But there’s a lot missing there, even from the viewpoint of spectators watching the launch.
Galaxy Zoo participants usually have a keen interest in the Hubble Space Telescope. Not only has it delivered unparalleled views of galaxies, and advanced our understanding of cosmic distances, the relation between galaxies and black holes, and their coupled evolution – but we have a project scheduled for the coming year to observe Hanny’s Voorwerp [...]