Galazy Zoo succeeds, advances science!

galaxies from Hubble deep-field search

The Hubble telescope’s Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)  concentrated on an apparently blank section of space for about ten days and developed an image of the faintest, most distant galaxies yet seen—thousands of them, all previously unknown to science. Edwin Hubble divided galaxies into two kinds: elliptical or spiral. They are best sorted by human visual inspection. Faced with the task of classifying thousands of new galaxies, the Galaxy Zoo folks decided to set up a “galaxy server” and recruit apprentice classifiers on the Internet.

Their site is well set up with descriptions, examples, and a quick self-test. If you pass the self-test, you are invited to classify galaxies—for a minute, half an hour, or until you get tired of it. For accuracy, each galaxy is classified several times by different observers and their “votes” are recorded.

One of the things that they’re looking for is the collision of galaxies: merging galaxies are both rare and scientifically interesting.

The Galaxy Zoo team succeeded beyond their hopes. More than 100,000 volunteers took part. They classified galaxies quickly and accurately.

In fact, the Delphi phenomenon emerged again: the collective votes of instructed amateurs are more accurate than single votes from trained professionals. (Gee, maybe we can do this with oncology X-ray results. Even in a medical community! They’re pretty well all digital now.)

The first scientific papers from this effort have already been published.

The next step is to take a closer look at interesting objects such as merging galaxies or varieties of spiral galaxies. Until that’s set up classification is still going on with a new set of galaxies, which will be used for the next set of scientific papers. You, too, can participate on Galaxy Zoo.

Galaxies classified as merging

Sloan Digital Sky Survey of deep space

What is the Sloan Digital Sky Survey?

It’s a telescopic survey into deep space reveals that the galaxies are distributed in thin films like soap bubbles around enormous gaps.

The Galaxy Zoo project lets you help to classify some of the millions of new galaxies that this project has revealed for the first time.

The Sky Server has school projects and teachers’ materials for Grade 3 to University levels.

The Astronomy section briefly describes the history of astronomy
and gives the state of our knowledge of stars, quasars, galaxies, clusters, superstructures, and the large structure of the universe.

Colliding galaxies

This one is from the New Scientist:

Hubble images of colliding galaxies illustrate different stages of the violent events; these are compared with a computer simulation (Courtesy of NASA/ESA/Hubble Heritage Team/STScI/AURA/A Evans/U of Virginia/NRAO/Stony Brook U/K Noll/J Westphal)

The best of Hubble images

Jared provides a five-minute video of beautiful deep-space images from the Hubble Telescope.

The most important image ever taken

From YouTube comes a video of the Hubble Deep Field images into our universe.

Tdarnell says

This is the latest incarnation of the HDF video. The narration has been edited to include research from a paper in Physical Review Letters (2004) which puts the size of the universe at 46.5 billion light years.

Astronomy photo of the day: Logarithmic spirals

These beautiful curves are brought to you courtesy of NASA and… NASA.

Go read the explanation and follow some of the other links.

I notice that the storm is much smoother than the galaxy. It forms quickly and the forces creating it are relatively stable. The galaxy, on the other hand, is pushed and pulled by neighbouring “storms” of equal strength. Our galaxy, for example, is on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy, travelling at half a million km an hour. Luckily, humankind will be long gone when they collide, a couple of billion years from now. So much for the privileged planet!

Live-blogging the Polar Mars Lander

After nine months on the way, the Polar Mars Lander, Phoenix, will be landing in less than half an hour. You can watch it online at NASA.gov. Control of the mission is being run from Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Los Angeles County. They’re on Pacific Time, I’m using Eastern Time; and we are 16 light-minutes from Mars.

More than half of all Mars landers have crashed, so it will be a tense moment in the control room.
19:42, lander separated successfully from main rocket.
19:45, four minutes til start of decelleration
10:46, getting data instead of just signal tone
19:47, start of burn, 1 minute to peak heat
19:50, parachute deployed
Ground velocity 90 metres per second
Ground velocity, 80 m/s
19:52, radar switched to altitude mode
Lander separation confirmed.
Altitude 30 m.
1952, Touchdown signal detected!

First soft landing in 31 years! The Mars Polar Lander is north of the Arctic Cicle on Mars.
19:55, video communication is detected.
Next, the propulsion system will be pressurized.
In about fifteen minutes, when the dust settles, the solar panels will spread out.

Google maps meteor craters

They seem to be missing the big one in Sudbury from 1.9 billion years ago… but this is a fun, quick way to look up meteor craters and asteroid impact sites.

Japan launches Kizuna satellite

Japan has launched a communications satellite, Kizuna. Mitsubishi heavy industries  hopes that the satellite will supply 1.2 GB per second service.

Total lunar eclipse tonight!

There’s an eclipse of the full moon tonight. It’s the last total lunar eclipse until December, 2010. It starts at 8:42 p.m. Eastern Time and becomes total about 10:01 p.m. Totality lasts about 40 minutes. .

The CBC’s science column says:

Lunar eclipses occur when a full moon, on its usual orbit around the Earth, slips into Earth’s shadow. The eclipsed moon may appear washed in a copper or brown colour as sunlight leaks through the Earth’s atmosphere.

The full moon rose huge and silvery-gold in the east at dusk tonight. It should be spectacular if clouds don’t cover it. But the current satellite picture shows extensive cloud cover in Southern Ontario.

LOLcats in space

The space shuttle is at the International Space Station. They should be landing tomorrow Wednesday.

moar humorous pics

Currently reading: N-Space by Larry Niven

I might have read this book in 2003, but I don’t remember all the pieces in it, so either didn’t read it yet, I skipped around because I had read most of the fiction already, or it’s time to read it again.

This book contains contains short stories and essays by Larry Niven:

• “What Can You Say about Chocolate-Covered Manhole Covers?”–the chilling result of meeting someone who’s ‘a walking intelligence test’
• “The Fourth Profession,” one of my favourites. A bartender gets talking to an alien… and learns that there is no repeat business when you trade between the stars. The implications are, again, chilling, yet the story is charming.
• An essay about “Building The Mote in God’s Eye“
• “The Return of William Proxmire,” a short story featuring Robert A. Heinlein
• An exerpt from World of Ptavvs
• “Bordered in Black,” a warning about what we might find when we explore other worlds
• “Convergent Series,” a short-short story and mathematical joke.
• “All the Myriad Ways”: the psychological effects of infinite alternate universes
• An exerpt from A Gift from Earth, set on Niven’s world Plateau
• “For a Foggy Night” from Niven’s collection All the Myriad Wsys is one of my favourites. What if fog were a probability blur?
• “The Meddler”–hardboiled detective meets alien
• “Passerby”: a rammer realizes that no one else would have bothered…
• “Down in Flames,” Niven’s alternate history of Known Space
• An exerpt from Ringworld: Louis Wu is mistaken for a Builder
• An essay, “Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex”, about Superman’s sex life
• “Inconstant Moon,” a love story and astronomy puzzle
• “Cloak of Anarchy,” the nasty side of real anarchy
• An exerpt from Protector, the novel
• “The Hole Man,” about the first manned expedition to Mars and what was found there
• “Night on Mispec Moor,” a modern zombie story
• “Flare Time” describes a colony on a world with many ecosystems and frequent solar flares
• “The Locusts” postulates a developmental effect of population density or esrthbound psychology
• some unpublished backstory from The Mote in God’s Eye
• “Brenda,” a story set on a colony world that occasionally repels genetically altered invaders and that has limited interstellar trade
• “The Tale of the Jinni and the Sisters,” a new Arabian fairy tale
• “Madness Has Its Place,” a missing tale from Known Space, in which old fogeys secretly prepare to save the world
• “Niven’s Laws,” a collection of Larry Niven’s observations (and occasionally those of his wife, Marilyn)
• “The Kiteman”: either an exerpt from The Integral Trees or The Smoke Ring or a new short story from the same setting
• “The Alien in Our Midst”–why we might be able to understand extraterrestrial aliens.
• “Space,” describing a weekend of brainstorming about planning to colonize other planets

N-Space goes with Playgrounds of the Mind and, I suppose, Scatterbrain.

Test-driving Mars rovers

NASA engineers are running tests on two different models of Mars rovers on barren and cold Devon Island in Canada’s Arctic (according to the Discovery Channel’s Daily Planet science program). The test runs have been going on for at least four years.

K10-red and K10-black are designed to operate more independently and travel longer distances than the models currently in use on Mars.

K10-black maps sub-surface layers of the soil; K10-red makes a three-dimensional map of the surface.

Devon Island is here:

(from a high Arctic hiking site, Bigbluesky.ca)

View Comet Holmes from Ontario

Comet Holmes is a large, fuzzy ball visible to the naked eye. Check the Discovery Channel to see where look for it.

This might well be one of the brightest and largest comets of our lifetime, but unless the skies clear we won’t be seeing it.

Why do people laugh at Creationists? 4

Here we go again: Creationist Kent Hovind opens his mouth to change feet: