Updates

Check here for AstroQuest news and website updates from the science and outreach teams.

9 September 2020 – New workflow!

You may have noticed some big changes on the site. The computer algorithm used to guess which light comes from which galaxies in our images has been improved a lot, and we no longer need people to use paint tools to fix galaxies the computer got wrong. Read more about these changes here.

We’ve converted all your data over to the new workflow, so if you’ve been using the site for a while, you’ll have already unlocked some (or a lot!) of our new trophies. If you want to start again, contact us and we can reset your progress back to zero. Or you can just register a new account.

Since this is all new, you might find some bugs or issues, or you might have some feedback you want to give us. Feel free to post on the forums to let us know.

We’ll have some more updates soon, so make sure to check back!

9 October 2019 – Melbourne meet up and progress

Incredible, almost 56,000 galaxies are inspected! Congratulations AstroQuesters! We’re working on some exciting new things for AstroQuest in the background now, as well as keeping things ticking along.

Melbourne Meet Up

Some of the AstroQuest team will be in Melbourne this weekend and will be available for a meet up on Saturday the 12th of October near the Exhibition Centre in Melbourne city. If you’re keen to come say hi and chat about AstroQuest, drop us an email and we’ll work out the details with you. We’d love to say thank you in person to some of our citizen scientists, and we’re bringing along some AstroQuest goodies to share!

We’re working on

  • A competition (with prizes!) for AstroQuest users, likely to start early next year. Keep your eyes out for some spot prizes along the way as well, we’ll send you an email if you’re a winner!
  • Updates to the website to make it even more streamlined to use AstroQuest.
  • A help ‘panic’ button with examples of tricky galaxies that might help if you get a bit stuck inspecting a particular image.
  • More galaxies for you to inspect!

17 April 2019 – Site and Privacy Policy Updates

Wow, almost 28,000 galaxies inspected by all you fabulous AstroQuesters, 18,000 since our last update, thank you!

Updates since April 2nd include:

  • Teacher guides added for the Australian Curriculum.
  • New achievements have been added for our top users (hi Time Lords!). You can check out your achievements from your profile page while logged in.
  • We’ve added more information to our Privacy Policy about what information we’re collecting from you, why we’re collecting it, and what we’re doing with it. By opting-in and providing your consent to the collection of your personal information by AstroQuest and ICRAR you are agreeing ICRAR may use your information for the primary purpose of contacting you about AstroQuest’s activities including receiving the newsletters and participating in surveys/research in accordance with the AstroQuest privacy policy. You may opt out at any time by advising ICRAR. In the meantime you can find out more about our current information handling practices in our privacy policy and, if you have any questions, please contact us and we’ll be happy to help.

Thanks to everyone who has been sending us small issues and bugs as they’ve been noticing them, or just letting us know when they see something interesting via the report feature. Happy Questing!

2 April 2019 – Site Updates

Welcome AstroQuesters! Thank you for joining us on a journey through time and space…

We appreciate all the reports from users like you to help us iron out the kinks post our launch. Here are some updates that we’ve completed in the last week and a half:

  • Error messages flooding your screens and stopping your quest have now been fixed, thank you for your patience with this major one! If you find any of these error messages instead of galaxy images again please let us know ASAP.
  • When you’ve completed all the quests (thank you power AstroQuesters!) the bug that had you stuck in the final quest and no longer able to inspect galaxies (or threw you back to time novice) is now fixed. Once you’ve completed all quests, the final quest will deselect and you can continue to inspect random galaxies from the more than 60,000 already uploaded to the site. We’re working on more quests for those that are already through the first set, so stay tuned.
  • When you skipped a galaxy it wasn’t added to your gallery properly, nor counted in your quest count. This small bug with big ramifications has now been fixed, as skipping a galaxy (and letting us know why) is just as valuable as inspecting it. Unfortunately we can’t recover data from previously skipped galaxies, so you might see them again, but this time they will appear in your gallery and will be saved for the science team. If you skip a galaxy and it doesn’t show up in your gallery right away, please hold shift and refresh the galaxy inspection tool webpage to prevent your cache getting in the way of the update.

If you notice anything else that seems to be acting weirdly please get in touch via the Contact Us page and we will look into it as soon as we can.

Thank you for all your help so far, we can’t believe more than 10,000 galaxies have already been inspected in our first week! You’ve all done a fantastic job.