Zooniverse, the umbrella organisation for several well-known citizen science projects, like Galaxy Zoo, Moon Zoo,  Old Weather and of course Milky Way Project, has made a couple of exciting announcements recently.

Last month, the Zooniverse folks launched their latest project, Icehunters. In Icehunters, you can help look for icy bodies in the outer Solar System in images from large ground-based telescopes Subaru, in Hawaii, and Magellan in Chile. I love the look of the site and the science is really cool – but wow, are those images ugly! In terms of aesthetics, this may well be the most realistic citizen science project to date

Last week, Zooniverse issues its first ever open Call for Proposals. Thanks to funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, researchers can now apply to Zooniverse to set up citizen science projects in their area of science, as long as they can provide the expertise, science support and a dataset. Deadline for applications is 15 August and all details are here.

Congratulations to Arfon, Chris, Rob and the whole Zooniverse team on all the exciting developments.

In recent weeks, I’ve spent a lot of time talking about Milky Way Project science with colleagues who aren’t involved in the project. It’s been really great to see others appreciate the value of what we’ve done, which seems to show that “out of the box” research methods are becoming more established in the community. Our first paper is taking shape, and I hope it’s the first of many to use our dataset.