Help Count the Stars

Here’s a fun thing to do this January: help count the stars to see how dark the sky is near you. While you’re looking for Comet Lovejoy, take a moment to count some stars for a school project. Over the past few weeks I’ve been helping A-Level student, and fellow Witney resident, Jesse Lawrence with […]

A Daily Dose of Zooniverse

‘Something awesome from the Zooniverse every day’ was the tagline that we came up with, almost a year ago, for a new Zooniverse blog: Daily Zooniverse. Grant Miller had recently arrived to work at Zooniverse HQ in Oxford and I had a todo list of things I’d always wanted to try but hadn’t found the time […]

The Zooniverse (and Me!) in Wired UK this Month

This Month’s edition of Wired (UK) includes a feature article about citizen science and crowdsourcing research. It has interviews with yours truly, as well as many lovely people from the citizen science crowd, including buddies Chris Lintott, Kevin Schawinski, and Amy Robinson. It also has notes about my new collaboration with fellow TED Fellow Andrew Bastawrous and our […]

LSST, Public Data, and NAM Hack Day 2014

Today is the start of the UK National Meeting in Portsmouth. I’ll be there tomorrow, and running the NAM Hack Day on Wednesday with Arfon Smith – which is going to be awesome. Today at NAM, the nation’s astronomers will discuss the case for UK involvement in the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope project – the LSST. The […]

Crowdsourcing the First World War: A Lovely Social Machine

Working at the Zooniverse means that I get to indulge many of my interests beyond astronomy, like history. In January we launched a project in partnership with the Imperial War Museum and the National Archives called Operation War Diary. It’s a ‘citizen history’ site that asks the public to tag and transcribe more than one million war diaries, and other handwritten notes, produced on the […]

The Zooniverse in 3mins 21s

This was recorded at the Citizen Cyberscience Summit in London in February – it’s me summarising the Zooniverse for anyone out there that might like to try out our own brand of Citizen Science.

A Brand New Milky Way Project

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 […]

Zooniverse Jobs – Come Work with Us in Oxford

We’re expanding the Zooniverse team in Oxford and we’re looking for web developers. You need to be able to work in Oxford (which is a lovely place to work) and you need to want to change the way science is done! There are four positions we need to fill: Infrastructure Engineer Senior Front-End Developer Data Scientist/Hadoopist […]

Kepler-90: An Amazing, Tiny Solar System Where Internet Rumours Come True

We recently posted news of a Planet Hunters planet discovered as part of a seven-planet system. Like all the Planet Hunters stars this is one seen in data from NASA’s Kepler spacecraft. Dubbed Kepler-90 this system is a peculiar microcosm of our own Solar System, with small (probably rocky) worlds in the middle, and larger (probably […]

UNAWE’s Excellent ‘Citizen Science in Astronomy’ Poster

This is a poster from CAP2013, which am attending in Warsaw. Love the idea and the design. Follow @UNAWE on Twitter and find them online at http://unawe.org/.