The Universe is full of galaxies of various shapes; some galaxies have spiral arms and others don’t. Why do galaxies show such diversity? How were galaxies formed and evolved? Galaxies are thought to grow by interacting and merging with other galaxies, and the galaxy mergers may be the key process creating the variety. GALAXY CRUISE is the first citizen science project conducted by National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ) to unlock galaxies’ secrets using the big observational data. We made the superior quality big data taken by the Subaru Telescope accessible to the public and invited them to participate in data classification. Here we report how we designed the website and its first-year progress.

Section 4 of the FM14 focus on the outreach action and advocacy in the context of IAUs 2020-2030 Strategic Plan. This paper also contains supplementary materials that point to contributed talks and poster presentations that can be found online.

We are conducting a survey of the CO J=2-1 line emission in the southern Milky Way (the Tokyo-Onsala-ESO-Calán Galactic CO survey), using the 60-cm radio telescope (VST2) in La Silla, Chile. It is combined with the northern survey made with the identical telescope (VST1) at Nobeyama (e.g., Sakamoto et al. 1995), and is directly comparable with the Columbia survey of the CO J=1-0 emission (e.g., Dame et al. 1987).