WHAT HAPPENS TO THE IMAGES YOU DON’T MARK?
Each night, we retire images from the pool based on your collective classifications. If the community together says no (i.e. by enough people not placing a marker on the image), we throw out the image so that we can focus your classifications on fresh data and images that might contain gravitational lenses. After only five weeks, you guys have made an astonishing 5.2 million classifications. This means we’ve been able to already reject about 60% of the total CFHT Legacy Survey as not containing gravitational lenses!

WHAT HAPPENS TO THE IMAGES YOU DO MARK?
When you mark an image two things happen. First, we record your mark in our database so we can compare it with what other people thought. Second, that image is automatically saved into your Talk profile under a collection called “My Candidates”. Talk allows you to discuss your interesting candidates with the rest of the Space Warps community. It’s great to see so many discussions happening there already, so please keep talking! Talking in Space Warps is an essential part of refining the list of plausible candidates, which is explained next.

HERE’S HOW YOU CAN HELP
As we work our way through the images, it looks as though we are going to end up with a sample of a few thousand lens candidates from your markings. That’s great – it means Space Warps is a very effective filter! But a few thousand is still several times more than the number of actual lenses we expect – so we’ll need to investigate the images of the candidates further before presenting them to the rest of the astronomy community. This is where you, and Talk, can really help us out!

BECOME CURATORS OF YOUR LENS COLLECTIONS
If you see a lens candidate, either when browsing Talk, or while you are marking, that you would like to see investigated further, make a “collection” called ‘Probable Lens Candidates’ and add this object to it! Remember, you can also add images you think are the most likely lens candidates from your automatically filled ‘My Candidates’ collection. Then, later on, you might do some further investigation of the images in your collection – or someone else in the collaboration might do it, after browsing your collections. Either way, collecting the candidates is the first step.  You can start a discussion about any candidate or collection any time, and ask the Space Warps community to share their thoughts.

WHAT HAVE YOU FOUND SO FAR?
We’ve just started looking at the most commonly marked images, and there are some promising candidates already being discussed in Talk. Some of these are previously known lens candidates: as you may know, the CFHT Legacy Survey has been searched using automated computer algorithms. We’ve started to label the candidates from those searches in Talk, you’ll see the label “Known Lens Candidate” at the bottom right of the image in the individual object page of Talk. As well as the labels, Budgieye has done a phenomenal job in collecting known CFHT-LS lens candidates from the research literature in a dedicated discussion board. Much like the tricky simulations, some of these known candidates may be difficult to spot.

Most excitingly, some of you have started discussing a few lens candidates that we think have been missed by the algorithms – watch this space for a special post about these potential new lens candidates next week!!!

HOW TO GET STARTED IN TALK
If you want some top tips on using Talk, please visit the discussion board (thanks Budgieye!)

Thanks again for your phenomenal work – and let’s get Talking!!!