h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've done about 100 on my first night & emailed them about one which seemed odd, got the "auto reply"; but they are totally snowed under with the response.

They may get even more snowed under now we are linking them from hootoo, i put it onto Ask thread!

It's jolly good fun isn't it!

zdt

I was clicking away at the photos when I suddenly realized I have no idea why galaxies should collide.

If the universe started at a point and is expanding out so that things are getting farther apart, how does this happen?

just wondering. i'll go back and click some more now.

You got post 42 pailaway!!!

*off to click onstar stuff.*

zdt

I have an idea why galaxies collide, but it's rather a long explanation, so I haven't time to give it now.

the following Thomas Dolby songs makes think of galaxy zoo

I drove all over Hollywood looking at the stars
first I ate my milky way and then I ate my mars
but sucking on a galaxy I noticed something pretty bizarre
there's not a lot of people there, just an awful lot of cars.

Thomas Dolby - pulp culture - aliens ate my buick (cd)
http://www.tmdrfan.com/tmdr/lyrics/aamb/pulp_culture.html

trains collide on a regular basis
stars explode and fireworks don't
a sea runs dry and a moon leaves its orbit

Thomas Dolby - that's why people fall in love - astronauts & heretics (cd)
http://www.tmdrfan.com/tmdr/lyrics/aah/that's_why_people_fall_in_love.html

waves to the Galaxy Baby Zoo!

Here's a beauty!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/eoinmcauley/845376862/

It certainly is.

Yes, yes, yes.

A couple of mine made it onto http://galaxyzoo.wordpress.com/

[(Double) Amazement from Ann!]

and thanks for the link to that site - I see where it explains how to get the larger photo - that's going to be nice.

I'm clicking away even as we squeak! I wonder how many people they have got signed up doing this?

Gawd, do you think we might eventually run out of galaxies?

zdt

This is so cool Galaxy Babe!
Thanks for the postings.

If every registered user was clicking away at the speed I'm doing it, they'd all be done by now.

http://galaxyzoo.wordpress.com/ has been updated, and he's added one of mine, the second one down, the blue dragon

I find the whole thing totally awesome! A sceptical friend said "hah; they are just using "you lot" as unpaid help" but my reply was "hey, nobody is forcing us, i feel utterly priveleged to be able to see this stuff using *their* equipment & possibly adding to the knowledge of the Universe is an honour beyond price!"

It's really rather nice that us feeble little humans seem to be better at spotting "weirdness" than a computer. Maybe HAL didn't quite close the pod bay doors.

zdt

I agree - if this were forced upon some poor graduate student, it could be mind numbing, but it's not. In fact, we are participating in a distributed activity only made possible by the internet. Not only are the photos awesome - so is being part of something so new.

Btw, that 'blue dragon' looks very familiar - I actually think I clicked on that one too. I'm not totally sure, of course, but if it's so it would confirm an idea that occurred to me early on. Namely, that if it were me setting this thing up, I would certainly have included some redundancy in order to evaluate the accuracy of the categorizations - ie I would set it up so that say 10% of the photos would be viewed at least twice so I could compare the results. Just an idea.

Anyway, I'm off to click some more.

Yes, that occurred to me too. If say: 10% of volunteers, who are not experts all agreed that something is "special" in their eyes; that would alert them to look more closely, whereas what might seem "oh cool, far out!" to one person could quite probably be a waste of time investigating further.

Generally i think we are probably helping weed out the more ordianry stuff (as if any galaxy could be ordinary!) & giving them space (!) to concentrate on the "extra" ordinary.

Hey, think how good it looks on your CV: Hobbies: analysing galaxies.

zdt

zdt

I've been doing the "you lot are just unpaid workers" thing for SETI since 1999. That was my reason for buying my first home PC. I had no idea how much it would enrich my life (the PC, not SETI) it was just months later I found hootoo so what a bonus. I wouldn't otherwise have met you lot and I can't imagine my life without it or if I'd never found hootoo in the first place I'm a good writer now, and I sub-edit other people's work! All thanks to my of astronomy.

Once these pictures get out, galaxy-gazing is going to be seriously they should make a calendar of the best 12 for 2008 and raise funds for the project or something like charity.

I showed my friend Maureen my folder of stored pics and she was ooh-ing and aah-ing at the images but she's not interested in the project itself. That's OK, more for us
Last night I found Messier 101 which is already published at Galaxy Zoo Wordpress, so I know for sure they're being recycled now.

http://cas.sdss.org/astro/en/tools/chart/chart.asp?ra=159.01606479&dec=35.15377878 (a sleeping angel) and
http://cas.sdss.org/astro/en/tools/chart/chart.asp?ra=179.36891755&dec=31.08395723 (a blue stork?)

ooh, useful site!



The calendar is a great idea!

zdt

http://www.galaxyzooforum.org/

You need to register separately for that but it accepted my same username and password after I got the activation email

OK, I seem to be the only person on the getting this error message:

Server Error in '/' Application.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Runtime Error
Description: An application error occurred on the server. The current custom error settings for this application prevent the details of the application error from being viewed remotely (for security reasons). It could, however, be viewed by browsers running on the local server machine.

Details: To enable the details of this specific error message to be viewable on remote machines, please create a tag within a "web.config" configuration file located in the root directory of the current web application. This tag should then have its "mode" attribute set to "Off".


<!-- Web.Config Configuration File -->








Notes: The current error page you are seeing can be replaced by a custom error page by modifying the "defaultRedirect" attribute of the application's configuration tag to point to a custom error page URL.


<!-- Web.Config Configuration File -->







at Galaxy Zoo. I've been to the forum and they're all saying it happens at busy times but it's not happening now. I've tried different browsers, rebooting, typing in the web addy manually
nothing does any good...