2,617,570

. . . classifications were achieved during the 100 Hours of Astronomy at Galaxy Zoo. Yep - in 4 days, we got two and two-thirds million galaxies . . .

We'd been chattering away about the possibilities in the IYA thread. April 1st was getting nearer and nearer and we weren't hearing anything, and in any case I for some reason had the notion that it would be cool for us to have our own separate 100 hours, so that zooites could explore other things during the 100 hours and lots of people could come and try the zoo another time - perhaps I was inspired by a letter-writer's remark about how it had packed more punch for Robin Cook and Clare Short to resign at separate times, giving Tony Blair two crises to deal with rather than one. So I suggested a galaxy marathon on April 28th, which is Kevin's birthday (speaking of whom, nice article about him again!), and Fluffyporcupine's into the bargain. But all of a sudden we did go ahead with the 100 hours.

For the biased images, Kate made what we called a "zoo-ometer". Now we had the next version, a Zoonometer (TM), as I'm supposed to call it. We watched the total climb . . .

. . . and on we raced, click click click . . .

. . . and at approximately 12:50 on Saturday afternoon, we wondered why it didn't burst and speculated upon ways to show it - with just over 28 hours to go.

And we decided to plug on. And bet each other that we'd get to 1.5 million. We just about did, we thought.

Then suddenly this morning Arfon announced we'd got 2.6 million. How did we do 1.6 million in the 28 hours remaining?! It's a great story why, and shows just how fast we were going - you can read a splended and entertaining account by our expert Arfon here. I would go so far as to suggest that we were up at a relativistic speed, making things appear differently between observers . . .

WELL DONE ARFON! You are a star!


Many people are all for the special targets to meet again, though not to have that all the time or we just get used to it. The Hawthorn effect states that people perform better if they know they're being observed, a variation on the uncertainty principle with a bit more certainty about which way things will go generally!