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Yesterday I was involved in a live chat with Chris Lintott and Rob Simpson from The Zooniverse. We used a Google+ hangout to video chat about recent Galaxy Zoo science ( my paper ) and also answer questions from members of the public on future plans for Galaxy Zoo. You can view the whole chat (30 minutes) on The Zooniverse YouTube Channel .   The Zooniverse plans more of these events, so let us/them know what you liked about it and what didn't work.

Following my innocent tweet last month about the placement of New Scientist in a local Tesco Express I made a Storify of all the retweets and responses: Science Magazines are a Men's Interest.  The original picture. Tesco Express, Gunwharf Quays, Sunday 22nd May 2012 Tesco promised to look into it. As of 10 days ago I hadn't heard anything and I happened to be in another local Tesco and saw this: Take 2: Tesco Express, Elm Grove, Portsmouth, Monday 14th May 2012 So I thought I'd go again (but this time left it too late to make up a Storify it seems, so just a series of pictures of tweets below). However I am still disappointed that Tesco have kept the "Men's Interest" category at all - it seems unnecessary. Any comments on that choice?

A cross posting from the Galaxy Zoo blog . I'm delighted to announce that the latest paper based on Galaxy Zoo classifications was accepted to appear in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society earlier this week, and appears on the arxiv this morning (link ). Usually there is a long delay between submission and acceptance of papers (something Kevin discussed on the Galaxy Zoo blog in " What Happens Next - Peer Review "), but in this case the initial referee report came back after 2 days, and the paper was accepted only 2 weeks after the first submission so I never got time to post to the arxiv or write a blog post about it before it was accepted! This was certainly the smoothest and fastest referee process I've been through. ;) Here's the title page.    So what was new about this paper was that we combined information on the morphologies (whether or not the spiral galaxies had bars) with information on the amount of atomic hydrogen gas the galaxi...

(This is based on content I've been developing for upcoming talks on the transit of Venus, which are May 24th to the Pompey Physics Society; May 25th Dom giving talk at Portsmouth Grammar School, and Tuesday June 5th, 1.30pm and 2.30pm Workshop on board HMS Warrior in the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. Also was used as a basis for this blog post for my Zooniverse friends over at Planethunters . ) On 5th/6th June 2012 Venus will pass between the Earth and the Sun. It's shadow will cross the Sun taking about 6 hours in total, although the length of that which is visible varies significantly depending on where you live on Earth. In the USA the beginning of the transit will be visible as the Sun begins to set on 5th June, while in the UK we'll see the end of the transit after the Sun rises on 6th June. Global Visibility of the 2012 Transit of Venus. The planet Venus orbits the Sun inside the orbit of the Earth, and passes between the Earth and the Sun quite frequently. However t...

Long time Zookeeper Steven Bamford has made a new website on which you can easilly write any words you like from the galaxy alphabet found by Galaxy Zoo volunteers and posted on the Forum.He's called the website:  My Galaxies - Write in Starlight!    Enjoy!

Cross post from the Galaxy Zoo blog . I was embarrassed to discover today that I never got around to writing a full blog post explaining our work studying the properties of the red spirals, as I promised way back in October 2009 . Chris wrote a lovely post about it " Red Spirals at Night, Astronomers Delight ", and in my defense new science results from Zoo2, and a few other small (tiny people) things distracted me.  I won't go back to explaining the whole thing again now, but one thing missing on the blog is the colour magnitude diagram which demonstrates how we shifted through thousands of galaxies (with your help) to find just 294 truly red, disc dominated and face-on spirals.  A colour magnitude diagram is one of the favourite plots of extragalactic astronomers these days. That's because galaxies fall into two distinct regions on it which are linked to their evolution. You can see that in the grey scale contours below which is illustrating the location of all of t...

The next in my series of beautiful galaxies is inspired by today's Astronomy Picture of the Day Image. M106 Close Up  (from APOD) Credit:  Composite Image Data -  Hubble Legacy Archive ;  Adrian Zsilavec, Michelle Qualls, Adam Block  / NOAO / AURA / NSF Processing -  André van der Hoeven This is a composite Hubble Space Telescope and ground based (from NOAO) image. The ground based image was used to add colour to the high resolution single filter (ie. black and white) image from HST. M106 has traditionally been classified as an unbarred Sb galaxies (although some astronomers claim a weak bar). In the 1960s it was discovered that if you look at M106 in radio and X-ray two additional "ghostly arms" appear, almost at right angles to the optical arms. These are explained as gas being shock heated by jets coming out of the central supermassive black hole ( see Spitzer press release ). In this composite image of spiral galaxy M106 (NGC 4258), optical data from t...