We submitted the first Milky Way Project paper to the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) in December and the referee has been very kind to us so far. We have our fingers crossed for acceptance soon. Thanks to recent media coverage and some awesome buzz at the recent AAS meeting we decided to go ahead and post our paper to the arXiv yesterday. In addition to the paper, which explains how the catalogue was created from all your bubble drawings, we have also made the data available on the MWP site. You can explore the data graphically or download various files on our data page.
DR1
Data release 1 (DR1) currently consists of a catalogue of large bubbles, a catalogue of small bubbles and a set of ‘heat maps’ (more on that in a moment). We are aiming to add green knots, red fuzzes, star clusters and galaxies to this list later in the year. We’ve called it DR1 because we also hope to refine and improve our catalogue – partly based on feedback from the community – and release a second set of data (DR2) later in 2012. Hopefully 2012 will be a big year for the project!
We have also nearly finished the process of cresting our ‘heat maps’. These are the maps of raw clicks that show the true crowd-sourced view of where bubbles are locate din our galaxy. they look amazing and are incredibly detailed and rich. They represent something new for the Zooniverse, and for the scientific community, and it will be interesting to see if they can be useful when released into the wild. If you’d like a sneak peak you can download one of the 3°x2° regions of the galaxy here and try it out – this is the region seen in the image above. It is a 5.4 MB FITS file, centred around 18° Galactic longitude and shows the raw bubble drawings that were used in the DR1 release. Every bubbles is given the same, tiny opacity and so as the bubbles coincide we start to see the regions of the sky where every agrees that bubbles are present. (A 220 MB file of public Spitzer data for this region can also be download as FITS here, for comparison.)
The other big change that we need to make to the site in the next few days is the release of an official ‘authors’ page, crediting all our citizen scientist volunteers. 40,000+ individuals have taken part in the MWP and those who contributed to DR1 will be credited on the site soon. I’ll blog when that happens to let you know.
Keep Clicking!
All of this doesn’t mean the MWP is over though: far from it. In fact, the classifications you make now will be collectively refining and improving the data we have produced so far. We have plans, which i’ll explain at a later time, to modify the MWP interface so that each classifications contributed more efficiently to the final result. We also have new data to come in 2012 that will mean we can search for bubbles in whole new regions of the sky. Very exciting and there is much to look forward to in 2012!
The Milky Way Project Blog 
What software is needed to open the FITS files?
DS9 is a free, standalone app that astronomers use (http://hea-www.harvard.edu/RD/ds9/) and there is also a plugin for Photoshop: http://hubblesource.stsci.edu/sources/toolbox/entry/fits_liberator/
Greetings from Luxembourg. Lately the pictures appear quite blurry on MWP, why is this? I never had this problem before?
Thanks.
Bilis – of the 5,106 new images added to the site, approximately 1,300 of them are focussed on very small objects. In these cases the images will appear blurry. This is to be expected and we’d still very much appreciate you trying to draw anything you can still see. If you think there isn’t much to see then just submit the image without any drawings and you’ll not be shown it again.
Solid write up. I’m studying something like this here at University of Texas. It’s definitely helpful to learn new stuff from fellow writers and
obtain ideas from new sources. I’d love to utilize some of this material on my own webpage
(if you don’t mind). And of course, I’ll post a backlink to your site at milkywayproject.org on my own page. Kudos for sharing.