After a huge effort by all the Space Warps volunteers, who have together contributed over 10 million classifications, we have very nearly finished working through the 431,550 images of the CFHT Legacy Survey. A remarkable achievement!

It looks as though the result of this search will be a sample of just over 3300 gravitational lens candidates. Some of them are lenses that we already know about, from various automated searches, while some of them will be new discoveries. However, most will be “false positives” – objects that look like lenses, but actually are not. How do we go about sorting the wheat from the chaff?

The answer is: take a second look! We are setting up the SW website to enable a new round of classifications, one where we ask you to take a really good look at each image, and use all your lens-spotting experience to assess it – and, crucially, only mark it if you really think you see a gravitational lens. We are trying to refine the sample, to leave us with us a sample of candidates that have a very high probability of being lenses. We’ll always have the larger, complete sample from the first round; what we want now is a pure sample of lens candidates to present to the rest of the astronomical community.

To help you in this task, we’re making a few changes around the site. The first is that we are replacing the old “dud” training images (the ones where know there is no lens) with some more difficult images, that contain example false positives that we have identified. The challenge is not to be fooled by them, and only mark the objects you really think are lenses! Likewise, we’re selecting only the hardest sims to include in Space Warps Refine, to keep you on your toes… Secondly, we’re updating the Spotter’s Guide to include some new types of false positive that you’ve pointed out to us over the last few months: red stars are a good example, that we didn’t include in the original guide. We’re also adding to the Spotter’s Guide a gallery of known lenses for you to browse, to see the kinds of features we’re after. Some of the differences in appearance between gravitational lenses and spiral galaxies, mergers, and so can be quite subtle, so we think the Spotter’s Guide will be even more important in this refinement phase than ever. Likewise, it’s likely that you’ll want to call the Quick Dashboard into action more often than before, as you inspect the candidates. Finally, to make it obvious that the site is set up for the refinement, where more discernment is required, we’re painting it bright orange 🙂

It won’t take long for us all to look through the candidates, even when taking more time to make a considered judgement: but it should be fun, since every single image will contain something worth looking at. And we should have the final results from Space Warps very soon after! We’ll send an email out to the community when the reconfigured website is ready to go and the first classification phase is complete, which should be very soon now. In fact, you can help speed us along by making one last classification push 🙂 Thanks again for all your  contributions!