My Galaxies — write in starlight!

The Universe is full of galaxies, immense collections of stars, scattered throughout the vastness of space. To see them we need to use a telescope, and for all but the nearest that telescope needs to be pretty big to make out any details. Bigger than the average one you might have in your garage, anyway. Fortunately, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey has been kind enough to take pictures of millions of galaxies, and make them available for everyone to look at. These images have been used by hundreds of professional astronomers to make lots of new scientific discoveries. One big problem, though, is that it would take way too long for even a very keen group of professionals to go through all the images and actually look at them, to classify their appearances and spot interesting things.

That's where the Galaxy Zoo project stepped in. Galaxy Zoo asked members of the public, the Zooites, to look through nearly one million galaxies to make a catalogue of their shapes for scientific use. All of these objects are special, in their own ways, but some are particularly weird and wonderful. The Zooites started collecting these peculiar galaxies on the Galaxy Zoo Forum, the most beautifully simple, the most spectacular, the most messy, even those that happen to look like animals and, here we get to the point, letters of the alphabet!

Really? There are galaxies that look like letters? OK, S and Z I can believe, but M? H? R? Capitals or little letters? What about punctuation, or numbers?

Well, there aren't many, but when you've got pictures of millions of galaxies and an energetic group of Zooites there isn't much that can stay hidden! They sought them out and put them on the Forum, even organised them into handy lists and made fantastic messages and pictures spelling their names. But this was a bit time consuming for all but the most committed Galaxy hunter. Until, along came an astronomer whose boss had asked for a particularly stunning astronomical image. The Galaxy Zoo alphabet sprang to mind, but I'm not one to do things by hand. I'd much prefer to write a program to do it instead. The nice thing about programming is it's then easy to do the same thing again, so a colleague and I used the tool to write a fun April Fools paper. Even then the code stayed sitting on a disk for ages, until it was finally made ready for the web at Science Hack Day: Chicago. So now everyone has the power to make the galaxies do their bidding! They're yours to play with...