Yearly Archives: 2009

galaxies, galaxy classification

I’m a Galaxy Zookeeper

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Are YOU?

M51 -- the Whirlpool Galaxy -- as seen by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The SDSS provided the data set that is used by the Galaxy Zoo 2.
M51 -- the Whirlpool Galaxy -- as seen by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The SDSS provided the data set that is used by the Galaxy Zoo 2.

Fellow science writer and astronomer Chris Lintott of Oxford University in the United Kingdom is one of the founders of a unique project that everyone can participate in. It’s called the Galaxy Zoo and lets you and me and anybody else who wants to participate chip in and do some actual astronomy.  The project was first launched in July 2007 and if you joined up then, you had a huge assortment of galaxies to study and categorize according to their shapes.  The site got more than 50 million classifications from nearly 150,000 participants.

Well, that was so successful and resulted in several papers published about the project that the group behind Galaxy Zoo decided to focus on the nearest, brightest, and most beautiful galaxies. Starting today, they’re available for users to study and classify in the updated Galaxy Zoo 2 database.

The best part about this is that just about anybody can do this. In fact, the more people who participate, the better the science is. This is because multiple classifications allow the scientists in the project to focus on specific types of galaxies, and the more people who identify a galaxy as a spiral (for example) the more reliable its classification is.

I joined in the Galaxy Zoo project not long after it first opened up, and I spent some classifying galaxies (after I passed their painless entrance exam).  Now that Zoo 2 is up, I’m happily resuming the role of zookeeper. Won’t you join me and the other 150,000 or so folks who help keep the cosmic zoo classified and tidy?  Come on in — they don’t bite and there’s a lot of satisfaction in working with scientists to study the cosmos of galaxies out there.

art, galaxies, galaxy garden

This Garden Universe

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The Galaxy Garden

The Galaxy Garden at Paleaku Peace Gardens Sanctuary on the Big Island of Hawai'i. Image copyright 2013 Carolyn Collins Petersen.
The Galaxy Garden at Paleaku Peace Gardens Sanctuary on the Big Island of Hawai’i. Image copyright 2013 Carolyn Collins Petersen.

Back when I was in college the first time (about the time of the Triassic), I had an astronomy professor who encouraged us to be creative in our final projects for extra credit. I was already running an A in the class, so I decided to do a book review of a popular “science” book that turned out to be about a hoax subject.  Some of my other classmates were much more creative, and so they turned in things like a pizza in the shape of M51, quilted stars, and star poetry.

I was reminded of that class (and how much fun we had the last day eating that pizza and listening to a poetry reading) when I saw a little blurb online about the Galaxy Garden in Kona, Hawai’i.  It’s an actual garden in the shape of our Milky Way Galaxy and each plant and flower has special significance to help explain the shape and makeup of our galaxy. There’s an amazing wealth of educational info on the website — I suggest you check out the page and its wonderful explanations of the art and design, as well as the science of the garden!

I happen to be a huge fan of the Big Island of Hawai’i.  I did two planetary science field trips there during grad school, went on an eclipse expedition there in 1991, have been to several meetings there and in Honolulu, and I work with the folks at Gemini and Subaru Observatories from time to time with their public outreach materials.

I’m also a fan of Jon Lomberg’s work. He lives on the Big Island but his work is known world-wide. His art is featured in Cosmos (the ground-breaking TV documentary by Carl Sagan and Anne Druyan), and has been commissioned by NASA, the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Sky & Telescope Magazine, and on the covers of various magazines and books.  He’s a great and creative guy and so it’s no surprise that he conceived of and implemented this lovely garden at the Paleaku Peace Gardens Sanctuary in Kona. It looks wonderful and I can’t wait to go back to the Big Island and see it!