Ten Years of GalaxyZoo
Posted by on Tuesday, July 11, 2017
Happy 10th Anniversary to the team behind the GalaxyZoo website!
Back in 2007 a group of astronomers set up this program that would provide images from professional telescopes to the public, and allow dedicated volunteers to classify the different types of galaxies that were visible. This has produced countless academic papers in peer reviewed journals, and has allowed an army of amateur scientists to have a real impact on our understanding of the Universe.
On a personal level, I was a graduate student at the time working on completing my doctoral dissertation and came upon this new project. (I think it was actually one of my fellow graduate students who was working on galactic dynamics who actually told me about it). Whenever I was stuck on a calculation or just needed a short break, I would navigate to GalaxyZoo and run through a few dozen classifications.
Since that time GalaxyZoo has led to the Zooniverse collection of citizen science projects that have allowed volunteer scientists to contribute to fields as diverse as animal studies in Africa and Asia, to cellular dynamics and medicine, to transcribing historical records, and in fields of physics ranging from the search for the Higgs particle at the LHC to searches for exoplanets and studies of the largest structures in the Universe.
So congratulations to all of the people who created this project, to all of the staff and scientists who have worked on it through the years, and especially to the thousands of amateur scientists who have taken the time to contribute to these valuable projects. It is time to celebrate!
Back in 2007 a group of astronomers set up this program that would provide images from professional telescopes to the public, and allow dedicated volunteers to classify the different types of galaxies that were visible. This has produced countless academic papers in peer reviewed journals, and has allowed an army of amateur scientists to have a real impact on our understanding of the Universe.
On a personal level, I was a graduate student at the time working on completing my doctoral dissertation and came upon this new project. (I think it was actually one of my fellow graduate students who was working on galactic dynamics who actually told me about it). Whenever I was stuck on a calculation or just needed a short break, I would navigate to GalaxyZoo and run through a few dozen classifications.
Since that time GalaxyZoo has led to the Zooniverse collection of citizen science projects that have allowed volunteer scientists to contribute to fields as diverse as animal studies in Africa and Asia, to cellular dynamics and medicine, to transcribing historical records, and in fields of physics ranging from the search for the Higgs particle at the LHC to searches for exoplanets and studies of the largest structures in the Universe.
So congratulations to all of the people who created this project, to all of the staff and scientists who have worked on it through the years, and especially to the thousands of amateur scientists who have taken the time to contribute to these valuable projects. It is time to celebrate!
I am a theoretical physicist & mathematician, with training in electronics, programming, robotics, and a number of other related fields.
