Just to let you know that the supernova zoo will be offline for most of this week. The search that feeds data to us, the Palomar Transient Factory, is undergoing some maintenance. They’re re-aluminising the mirror of the telescope to improve the sensitivity, which usually takes a few days during which the telescope can’t be [...]
Hello from the William Herschel Telescope, where I’m observing some of those lovely supernova candidates that have been pouring out of The Supernova Zoo lately.
It’s been a while since our last update. We’ve been running supernova zoo in a very serious way now for several months, and, after ironing out a few little bugs [...]
Hi Zoo fans,
My name is Peter Yoachim and I’m currently a postdoc working in the Astronomy Department at the University of Texas in Austin.
I got involved with the Galaxy Zoo after I saw Karen’s paper on Red Spirals. When I first read the paper I thought, “Wow, that’s really cool, spirals shouldn’t look red like [...]
Good news, everyone!
Earlier this year we submitted a proposal to use the Chandra X-ray Observatory to observe a set of merging galaxies in X-rays. The target list for Cycle 12 has just been released, and with a bit of scanning, you can find a set of targets with names like “GZ_Merger_AGN_1″. These targets are a [...]
Here are some pictures from the recent Kitt Peak observing run, illustrating the experience beyond just our data collection (as interesting as that was, and continues to be). Collecting these was easier than usual since I had colleagues at the telescope, so I could run off and shoot pictures from the dome’s catwalk without worrying [...]
Hello from Kitt Peak again everyone. We are now more than half way through our observing run, everything is going really great, we are getting lots of spectra of our candidate galaxies. So far we have managed to do most of our top priority candidates!
Bill gave us a great post of what we are up to [...]
As noted on this forum post, we’re starting to run out of Voorwerpje candidates at the end of the night (because that’s the part of the sky that gets put of the SDSS imaging area). We’re asking for suggestions – so post your ideas and tell us why they’re interesting on the forum thread!
(This [...]
We have a team working at Kitt Peak again, this time using a spectrograph to chase down Voorwerpjes. As the Dutch diminutive indicates, these are like Hanny’s Voorwerp, only smaller. They are clouds of gas within galaxies (or out to their edges) which are ionized by a luminous active galactic nucleus. In most of these, [...]
Anna Manning and I are back at Kitt Peak, using the 3.5m WIYN telescope for
more observations of overlapping-galaxy systems from the Galaxy Zoo sample.
This trip started with an unexpected dust encounter. Indulging my fascination with some of the technological excesses of the Cold War, I dragged Anna (and my mother-in-law as well) to Tucson’s [...]
Hi all,
Just a quick note – our observations of IC 2497 and the Voorwerp have been scheduled for today and are taking place now. Since we’re observing in the X-rays, our “quick snapshot” to see what is going on actually takes almost a whole day. XMM-Newton’s eye isn’t very sharp, so we won’t get a [...]