Yes, it was 7 years ago to this very day that the Galaxy Zoo project launched. Back then I was a fresh young student going into a masters in Astrophysics looking for ways to procrastinate rather than working on my summer project, and boy was I excited when I discovered www.galaxyzoo.org! Hundreds of thousands of galaxies, many of which never seen before by human eye, waiting for me to classify them. I remember the joy I would get after spending a long time seeing fuzzy ellipticals to all of a sudden be presented with a stunning image of a grand design spiral with lots of star-forming, and it was ME they were trusting with the scientific classification! At this point I was not yet a professional astronomer. They were trusting the consensus of thousands of amateurs like me all over the world. WHAT A COOL IDEA!!!
They had a leaderboard at the time. My friend challenged me to get into the top 10. I never made it, even though I performed thousands of classifications there were many other people way more committed to it than me! Months passed and I slowly gave up participation in the project as my masters work took over, however the awesomeness of the idea stayed with me and I would tell everyone I talked to about it. Soon the project expanded as other scientists with too much data came calling. The Zooniverse was born. A place with multiple citizen science projects just like Galaxy Zoo.
6 years after creating my account on the project I was given a job with them! It’s been an interesting 7 years with many amazing moments for myself and for Galaxy Zoo. Happy birthday Galaxy Zoo, you’ve done nothing short of changing my life, and I hope we’re still together in some way 7 years from now!!!
That’s my personal birthday message. To see what other people are saying, check out the great birthday blogs by Becky Smethurst on the Galaxy Zoo blog.
Daily Zooniverse 