Yay! It’s live! Galaxy Zoo, part two. The ‘online astronomy project for everyone’ now has a new mission. If you’re reading this on its birthday, you’ve probably found my website through the press about it, or via the Galaxy Zoo Forum directly, where I’m one of the moderators. In any case, ‘we’re back’ and you can be a part of it!
Galaxy Zoo (part one) started out as an idea of a few astronomers who needed help in classifying galaxies. Apparently the human brain is still better at sorting those by shape than a computer and you don’t need to be a scientist to help. I’m a primary school teacher and found out about ‘the Zoo’ through Brian May, when it started in 2007. I signed up because I thought it would be cool to contribute to science, while looking through beautiful pictures of the universe.
It brought me a lot of fun, friends, knowledge and even fame, when a discovery I made – while clicking on those pictures – got named after me. I’m Hanny from ‘Hanny’s Voorwerp’ and this is my website. Welcome! You can read more about the first part of Galaxy Zoo and ‘Hanny’s Voorwerp’ on my pages at the right. But please come back to do that later…
First I recommend you check out ‘our Zoo’ and sign up! The questions are different, but the pictures are still great. Who knows what we’ll learn from all of this. And who knows who will make the next discovery. Find out how to join us here: www.galaxyzoo.org. And if you have questions, you can ask our friendly community here: www.galaxyzooforum.org. If you want to write to me: you can leave a comment on this blog, or send me an e-mail to the address on my contact page.
I hope to hear from you. This is very exciting! (And thanks to ‘Zookeeper’ Phil for the quote in the title).
8 Comments
Yeah, commenting on my own blog…
Should’ve posted it sooner, but I hadn’t thought of all the people who’d visit ‘me’ here too! Now, let’s classify some galaxies! 
Great, yes all you new visitors, come and see us at the Zoo
hi hanny
having heard of you and your discovery would like to say Hi – I am an english person living in holland.
gefeliciteerd … Was het leuk om chris lintott te ontmoeten? misschien neemt hij het ooit over van patrick moore of brian may zou het ook kunnen – THE SKT AT NIGHT – heb ik het over..
i have a simple (silly) question …
on galaxyzoo which I have just joined as ‘madrevangod’
I not sure how to send the information collected – or do I need to ?
sorry to bother you but I’m a bit duh with what to do.
thanks
Hi Carol,
Thank you very much for your reply to my blog. It’s always nice to hear from people who’ve found it. I’m assuming you prefer English and I like both languages, so…
If you were able to succesfully log in on the Galaxy Zoo page and started classifying (clicking the buttons to answer the questions), then you don’t need to do anything else. Your answers will be automatically saved.
I hope that answers your question, but if not, let me know.
Have fun writing science!
Cheers, Hanny.
P.s. And yes, Chris is a very nice guy.
P.p.s. I’ve sent this to your e-mail address too, in case you miss it here.
I’d be interested in a post about your website statistics (and actually the zoo’s, come to think of it). Could you draw a little graph with the peaks labelled with causes?
From your first comment to this post it sounds like you got a spike in visits.
Ta muchly.
Nicholas.
Hi Nicholas, thanks for your comment! I was thinking of writing a post about that myself, as it amuses me to see how many ‘visiting countries’ where on my site and how many people found it through the press of GZ2. (So yes, there was a peak). I’m not sure how accurate all these figures are, as I’ve never had a website before, but I might write about it in the future. I have no statistics of the GZ sites though, these are in hands of the ‘Zookeepers’. I hope you enjoy my blog and nice to hear from you!
I do enjoy your blog. You seem to have an affinity for my homeland.
I will try to keep my ears to the ground as to when the next GZ meetup takes place. I took part in the first one for a short while, then got distracted by life (new job, wife, babies) and forgot about it. When version 2 came up in the news I went back to see what was new.
Nicholas.
(Astrophysics alumnus, University of Hertfordshire)
Great.
If you want to be kept updated about GZ meet-ups, you should keep an eye on the ‘cafe area’ on the GZ forum. And I’ll put the ones where I’m going to be at in my calender as well! (See pages, top right). See you around Nicholas. 
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[...] you were around from the beginning, or joined when the second part of the project started, it has just become more interactive. Some members have posted ideas to [...]