Just over three years the Zooniverse launched the Milky Way Project (MWP), my first citizen science project. I have been leading the development and science of the MWP ever since. 50,000 volunteers have taken part from all over the world, and they’ve helped us do real science, including creating astronomy’s largest catalogue of infrared bubbles – which is pretty cool.
Today the original Milky Way Project (MWP) is complete. It took about three years and users have drawn more than 1,000,000 bubbles and several million other objects, including star clusters, green knots, and galaxies. It’s been a huge success but: there’s even more data! So it is with glee that we have announced the brand new Milky Way Project! It’s got more data, more objects to find, and it’s even more gorgeous.
This second incarnation of my favourite Zooniverse project[1] has been an utterly different experience for me. Three years ago I had only recently learned how to build Ruby on Rails apps and had squirrelled myself away for hours carefully crafting the look and feel for my as-yet-unnamed citizen science project. I knew that it had to live up to the standards of Galaxy Zoo in both form and function – and that it had to produce science eventually.
Building and launching at that time was simpler in one sense (it was just me and Arfon that did most of the coding[2]) but so much harder as I was referring to the Rails manual constantly and learning Amazon Web Services on the fly. This week I have had the help of a team of experts at Zooniverse Chicago, who I normally collectively refer to as the development team. They have helped me by designing and building the website and also by integrating it seamlessly into the now buzzing Zooniverse infrastructure. The result has been an easier, smoother process with a far superior end result. I’ve essentially acted more like a consultant scientist, with a specification and requirements. I’ve still gotten my hands dirty (as you can see in the open source Milky Way Project GitHub repo) but I’ve managed to actually keep doing everything else I now to day-to-day at the Zooniverse. It’s been a fantastic experience to see personally how far we’ve come as an organisation.
The new MWP is being launched to include data from different regions of the galaxy in a new infrared wavelength combination. The new data consists of Spitzer/IRAC images from two surveys: Vela-Carina, which is essentially an extension of GLIMPSE covering Galactic longitudes 255°–295°, and GLIMPSE 3D, which extends GLIMPSE 1+2 to higher Galactic latitudes (at selected longitudes only). The images combine 3.6, 4.5, and 8.0 µm in the “classic” Spitzer/IRAC color scheme[3]. There are roughly 40,000 images to go through.
The latest Zooniverse tech and design is being brought to bear on this big data problem. We are using our newest features to retire images with nothing in them (as determined by the volunteers of course) and to give more screen time to those parts of the galaxy where there are lots of pillars, bubbles and clusters – as well as other things. We’re marking more objects – bow shocks, pillars, EGOs – and getting rid of some older ones that either aren’t visible in the new data or weren’t as scientifically useful as we’d hoped (specifically: red fuzzies and green knots).
It’s very exciting! I’d highly recommend that you go now(!) and start classifying at www.milkywayproject.org – we need your help to map and measure our galaxy.
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[1] It’s like choosing between your children
[2] Arfon may recall my resistance to unit tests
[3] Classic to very geeky infrared astronomers
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