Radio Galaxy Zoo Talk

Radio Galaxy Zoo final sprint!

  • JeanTate by JeanTate

    That's the title of today's blog post (link).

    Here it is, in full:

    Here is a bittersweet announcement that the current first-generation Radio Galaxy Zoo project will be retiring on the 1st May 2019. We are so grateful to have worked with such a productive team of citizen and professional scientists for the past 5.5 years.
    To-date, we have made over 2.27 million classifications and published 10 refereed journal articles. We have another 1 submitted and another to be submitted in the next few weeks.

    Looking towards the future, we are of course in the process of developing the next-generation of Radio Galaxy Zoo projects. For that, we ask that you stay tune for our future announcements of the suite of Radio Galaxy Zoo 2 projects that we are planning to launch. Of course, we will be keeping you all informed about our latest RGZ-based follow-up observations (e.g. the Zoo Gems programme with the Hubble Space Telescope). Therefore, this is not the last message from us.

    To cap-off this impending retirement, I propose that we make a final RGZ sprint to the finish in the remaining days April 2019 –that is, let’s all try to classify as many sources as we can in the next few weeks!

    Thank you very much again and let’s all make a concerted push to the finish line!

    Cheers,

    Ivy & Stas

    Posted

  • leonie_van_vliet by leonie_van_vliet

    Thanks for this update Ivy & Stas,
    So lets make this last sprint in April, looking back on a wonderful time on RGZ. New horizons await!

    Finishing already with no less than a real image of a "BLACK HOLE" today on April 10th. 2019 what better way to get to the finish with amazing result before the end date! Messier 87 made history today the vail lifted looking into the heart of this galaxy...

    I would like to thank Jean, Victor, Ivan and others whom were always there to teach me. Making this journey on RGZ with you guys it was a great adventure!

    Leonie

    Posted

  • ivywong by ivywong scientist, admin

    Hi Leonie,
    You are very welcome and it should be us thanking you all for your tremendous patience. Thanks to all our RGZ citizen scientists, we now have the monumental task of analysing nearly 2.3 million of your classifications!

    I agree with you that yesterday has been a game-changing day for black hole astronomers all over. Don't get clear evidence of spinning black holes and general relativity everyday. M87 is also commonly known as Virgo A (the brightest radio source in the Virgo Cluster -- one of my favourite clusters). Just for fun, here is a pretty montage photo of the hot X-ray intracluster medium in orange (with M87 as the bright source in the middle) and the cold atomic Hydrogen gas in each of the cluster spirals: http://www.astro.yale.edu/viva/32-Virgo_med.jpg

    There will be more RGZ adventures along the way as quite a few of the team are planning harder-hitting science projects with you all and so I hope that you will remember us when we next release the next projects.

    Thank you again.
    Ivy

    Posted

  • leonie_van_vliet by leonie_van_vliet

    Promise I will! 😃 please keep me informed...

    Thanks for the link! http://www.astro.yale.edu/viva/32-Virgo_med.jpg

    Leonie

    Posted

  • ivywong by ivywong scientist, admin

    Will do Leonie and thanks heaps again,
    Ivy

    Posted

  • JeanTate by JeanTate

    Thanks Ivy.

    After 1 May, will RGZ Talk still be accessible?

    I remember that when the original Galaxy Zoo forum was closed, the URL(s) still worked, but the itself site was frozen (i.e. no editing, no new posts or threads, etc); will something similar happen with RGZ?

    And the main classification page - with its links to "Science", "Blog" etc - will that too be still accessible (if frozen)?

    Posted

  • sisifolibre by sisifolibre

    A bittersweet notice, no doubt. I wait the future RGZ don't delay too much...
    I hope this forum don't close, I think I have some work to do still with the collections and other stuff in the future.

    Posted

  • ivywong by ivywong scientist, admin

    Dear @sisifolibre,
    You make an excellent point and I too would be sad to see this forum's retirement. Therefore I have created a wiki space here: http://radiotalk1.pbworks.com/w/page/133062696/FrontPage

    Please go to the link above and click on "Request access". The idea is that this wiki will enable all of us to continue our collaboration after the retirement of Radio Galaxy Zoo.

    Unfortunately, there is no way of continuing this forum after retirement and this is why I have created the above wiki page and invite you all to sign up to it so that we can all keep in touch and stay updated to the latest paper results and science that we can continue working on as well as notification for the opportunity to Beta test the upcoming projects.

    Look forward to seeing you all on the new wiki.
    cheers,
    Ivy

    Posted

  • ivywong by ivywong scientist, admin in response to JeanTate's comment.

    Hi Jean, I suspect that this forum will be retired as well. This is why I have created a wiki for us to continue our communications and collaborations. However this wiki space does have a storage limit and so I urge you to copy over the important discussions and candidate lists over to a Google Doc space or a Dropbox space and link this up to the wiki. This way, we can reserve the wiki storage mainly for our discussions as our data/figures repository will all be kept in our individual cloud space.
    Thanks for your understanding,
    Ivy

    Posted

  • JeanTate by JeanTate in response to ivywong's comment.

    Thanks Ivy.

    Collections is one of the most valuable features of RGZ Talk, I feel.

    I suspect that, like sisifolibre, many of us regard some of our Collections as very valuable, representing much of what doing citizen science is about.

    If RGZ Talk is no longer accessible after 1 May, how can we download our Collections between now and then?

    I realize that there's a way to associate an ARG designation with a FIRST source (and hence an (RA, Dec) position), via the contents of a Kyle Willett post of some time ago; later today I'll find that post and provide a link/summary.

    Posted

  • leonie_van_vliet by leonie_van_vliet

    Hi Jean,

    That would be great!
    "I realize that there's a way to associate an ARG designation with a FIRST source (and hence an (RA, Dec) position), via the contents of a Kyle Willett post of some time ago; later today I'll find that post and provide a link/summary."

    I do treasure the features as well!
    Leonie

    Posted

  • JeanTate by JeanTate

    A bit later than I had hoped, but here is the thread with Kyle Willett's very helpful posts (the thread is titled "I have a position, how do I find which ARG fields contain it (if any)? SOLUTION").

    Note that what's in that thread also answers the question "I have an ARG field, how do I find the FIRST source at its center?", and also the question "I have an ARG field, how do find its position?" 😃

    Posted

  • ivywong by ivywong scientist, admin

    Hi Jean & Leonie,
    Yes, please feel free to copy as much as you can from individual posts such as the ""I have an ARG field, how do find its position?" post. You can place this under the "for future references" section of the wiki.

    For the "Collections", this will be tricky. I will email Grant to ask. In the meantime until I hear back from Grant, are you all able to copy over the list of objects, (especially the coordinates) and perhaps create Google spreadsheets of your collections?

    Thanks for your understanding and help again in this transition period. Truly appreciated.

    Posted

  • sisifolibre by sisifolibre

    I think I have found a easy and rudimentary way to copy a collection of ARG fields all at once, at last on Firefox and Chrome:

    1 You must go to "edit" the collection you want to conserve.

    2 You will see all the collection on the righ, without pages. Select all the subjects, right mouse-click.

    3 Then appear a "contextual menu", select "view source code selected" (or similar, in spanish "ver código fuente seleccionado")

    4 You will see a page with a lot of code. Copy all, paste in a spreadsheet separating the ARG field in a column to copy it. You can paste it in a simple TXT (or any kind of doc) too and search for ARG names later.

    5 Compare this column with the RGZtargets.csv that cand find on this thread or in my own Google drive here.

    Posted

  • leonie_van_vliet by leonie_van_vliet

    Thanks Victor,

    Going to use Crome to see if I can acces & will follow instructions above!I
    Kind greetings!

    Leonie

    Posted

  • ivywong by ivywong scientist, admin

    Hi all,
    Sorry for the slight delay, I am observing (using the ATCA) and so my concept of time is slightly strange. But I did get an update from Grant that the RadioTalk and Collections will be available as "read-only" after the retirement of the project. Therefore it would be easy to continue discussions on the wiki and refer back to anything that we still have online here.
    cheers,
    Ivy

    Posted

  • JeanTate by JeanTate in response to ivywong's comment.

    ... that the RadioTalk and Collections will be available as "read-only" after the retirement of the project.

    That is great news, thanks Ivy! 😃

    (I guess wishing you "clear skies" would be somewhat odd, right? 😉 Perhaps "no thunderstorms, quiet Sun, and no other RFI"?)

    Posted

  • ivywong by ivywong scientist, admin

    You are very welcome and I should be the one thanking you all for your patience and support. Thank you fore the observing well-wishes too. Luckily we are observing at 1.4GHz and so we are not as susceptible to weather conditions such as >20GHz observations. At 1.4 GHz, our idea of clear skies is "low-RFI" but yes, low-wind and no lightning storms is optimal. Ironically wifi was developed by radio telescope engineers here at CSIRO to assist with a team looking for merging black holes. Life is funny sometimes.

    Posted

  • ivywong by ivywong scientist, admin

    Thank you all very much.

    Posted