A few months ago I posted about a joint initiative between Euclid and Galaxy Zoo that involved engaging members of the public in a project involving galaxy morphology. Well, a new “collab” (as you young people call such things) has just been announced on social media, and I encourage you to investigate further
The new venture is called `Space Warps – ESA Euclid’, and its aim is to find strong gravitational lenses in Euclid survey images. You can find out more about this project in this blog post by Knud Jahnke and you can find instructions and sign up for the project here.
The announcement of this initiative gives me an opportunity to pass on a little update on progress with the Euclid survey. The first `Quick’ Data Release (known to its friends as Q1) was made available to Euclid Consortium members just a few weeks ago. This will be made available to the general public next March, around the same time as the joint ESLAB and Euclid Consortium meeting in Leiden next year.
The Euclid survey is constructed as a set of contiguous `tiles’ covering the survey region, which will ultimately be about 15,000 square degrees (about one-third of the sky), with most of the region scanned by the satellite many times. The Q1 data will just be a taster of this. The main component of the Q1 data relates to a single visit (at the depth of the Euclid Wide Survey) over the Euclid Deep Fields (EDFs): 20 deg2 of the EDF North, 10 deg2 of EDF Fornax, and 23 deg2 of the EDF South. The deep fields will subsequently be visited multiple times during the mission. The Q1 release will be of Level 2 data, i.e. data at the level of individual tiles.
The first full data release (DR1) is due to be published in June 2026.
In the Dark 