Words
This world cloud shows the first Planet Hunters paper – outlining the discovery of two planet candidates – as a ball of words. You might call it a Word Planet, in fact. The words used most often in the paper are the largest, such as transit (81 times), planet (71) and Kepler (51), whereas less-used words shrink away to the edges, such as SNR (5), technology (2) and faint (3).
This was created for the 2011 Zooniverse Advent Calendar. Download the full-resolution version here.
Welcoming Polish Planet Hunters
The Polish language version of Planet Hunters is now available. The creation of the first foreign language version of the project reflects our determination to make Zooniverse sites accessible to as many peoples possible, all over the world. The fact that the first foreign language version is Polish is not an accident. Many years ago, at the beginning of the Galaxy Zoo project, a determined bunch of science enthusiasts from Poland joined with the Galaxy Zoo team to create the very first international language version. They have been working with the Zooniverse ever since!
Planet Hunters in Polish was supported by Lech Mankiewicz from the Polish Academy of Science, Jan Pomierny from Polish astronomy portal Astronomia.pl and Mirek Kolodziej, an engineering student and astronomy enthusiast. Polish citizen scientists have now joined the worldwide community of planet hunters – welcome!
Thanks to the hard work of the team, this means we can now expect Planet Hunters to be available in other languages too. Watch this space!
Anniversary Competition
Before long Planet Hunters will be one year old – we launched on December 16th 2010. It’s been an incredible journey that began with a wild idea and resulted in new planets being discovered by people from allover the world. (The site became available in Polish last week, meaning that even more people can now become planet hunters in their spare time.)
To celebrate a year of amazing citizen science we’ve decided to host a little competition! Every day until Planet Hunters’ birthday on December 16th we’re picking one random classification and that user is getting a prize! All you have to do is classify on Planet Hunters on any day until December 16th to be part of the prize draw. We’ll announce winners, once they’ve been contacted, via the blog and twitter.
Each lucky planet hunter will win either a printed anniversary poster (featuring the names of all our volunteers, see sample above) or an awesome Planet Hunters mug. We’ll get in touch using the email address associated with your Zooniverse account, with you can check in the Account section of Zooniverse Home. The random planet hunter who logs in on our actual anniversary will win a mug, poster and a bonus Yale University mug too!
Good luck and happy planet hunting!
[If you can’t wait, you can download the poster here – warning it’s a 66 MB file.]
Planet Hunters 
