Galaxy Zoo Project Achieving Something Extraordinary

The Galaxy Zoo project (http://www.galaxyzoo.org) is about to achieve something extraordinary – and they want to share the excitement with you, the people that made it possible. The Zoonometer has been steadily ticking away toward their target of 60 million classifications. They can hardly believe it, but they’re nearly there! To say thank you, they want to give away a series of prizes to the people providing the remaining clicks that take them to their goal. In addition, the person that makes the 60 millionth classification will receive a special prize.

To mark this historic moment in the Galaxy Zoo’s history, the person that makes the 60 millionth Galaxy Zoo classification will receive a bundle of goodies, including a Zooniverse t-shirt and mug, a Galaxy Zoo poster and an original Sloan Digital Sky Survey plate!

As well as this, they’re giving away individual prizes to one person at random for each collection of 250,000 classifications, starting with the 57,000,000th classification. To take part, all you have to do is go and classify some galaxies and make sure your Zooniverse email address is up to date so they can contact you.

You might wonder why 60 million is the goal. With that many classifications in the database, the Galaxy Zoo 2 project will have reached a critical point. 60 million classifications represents their minimum, ideal database. With that many classifications you, the participants, will have collectively classified every galaxy enough times to create an incredibly robust, well-defined and scientifically valid catalogue of Sloan galaxies. Beyond the 60 million classifications, every additional click still goes into the database – it just means that our minimum science goal is achieved.

You can keep track of their progress using the Zoonometer. As if prizes weren’t enough, there is more. Beyond 60 million, something very special will happen to Galaxy Zoo. We’ll keep you up to date, but once they reach the 60 million target, they are free to make some changes to Galaxy Zoo, which they think you’ll rather like.

P.S. Galaxy Zoo Supernovae (http://supernova.galaxyzoo.org) is back after the winter break and needs your help finding new supernovae.