Yesterday – or today depending on your timezone – Google featured the Zooniverse as part of their One Today app in the USA. This is a fantastic chance to spread to word about the Zooniverse and to give people the chance to donate directly to help make it better. You can also see us on Google’s amazing 12 Days of Giving website.

Regardless of where you are in the world, we think that the best thing most of you can give us is your time. So we’ve created giving.zooniverse.org which you can use to tell the world (or your social network at least) that you’re giving some of your time to the Zooniverse this holiday season. Perhaps you can help spread some citizen science cheer – or just show off that you’re an awesome contributor to science online.

Happy holidays, Merry Christmas, Nadolig Llawen – or whatever you say at this time of year!

Have a drink on the Zooniverse this festive season. Last year we created  a list of festive Zooniverse cocktails for the grown-ups amongst you. Here are a few more, courtesy of our very own Chris Lintott.

Planet 4 Margarita

This is a recipe passed onto me from the Mars Phoenix team, who were looking for two of its components – salt and ice – in the Martian arctic, a region not dissimilar to that explored by Planet 4 volunteers. It’s a nice twist on a classic margarita.

• 2 cups tequila (a cup is a strange American unit. I use ‘some’ tequila)
• 1-2 hot chillies, preferably habaneros
• Salt
• 6 cups pink grapefruit juice

Half the chillies and mix with the tequila. Allow to stand for the amount of time you can stand it, but at least a few hours. (The longer you leave it, the spicier the tequila). THROW THE CHILLIES OUT.

Dip the rims of the glasses into a little of the juice, then roll in the salt. Shake tequila and grapefruit juice in a 1:3 ratio with plenty of ice and serve in salted glasses. Drink until the rushing onset of winter brings with it an icy tomb. (Actually, that last bit might only apply to Phoenix itself)

PH1b

• 2 shots Scotch – I like a nice smokey Islay blend like Black Bottle.
• 1/2 shot sweet vermouth
• 1/2 shot dry vermouth
• Dash Angostura bitters
• Cherry

This is a perfect Rob Roy, but we’ve renamed this classic in honour of our planet with four stars, PH1b. The four liquid ingredients represent the four stars, so shake all of them together and serve in a Martini glass, adding the cherry to represent the planet. This cocktail is not to scale.

Galaxy Zoo Treacle

Becky Smethurst, our new(isn) Galaxy Zoo PhD student in Oxford, loves rum, so this is in honour of her first term in the Zooniverse. As with spiral galaxies, the direction of stirring is essential.

• 2 shots Rum – preferably dark Jamacian rum
• 1/4 shot Sugar syrup (you can make this by dissolving lots of sugar in water – typically 1 water : 2 sugar)
• 1/2 shot apple juice
• 2 dash Angostura bitters

Put two ice cubes in a glass and stir in the sugar syrup and the bitters. Stir clockwise. Add 1 shot rum, with two more ice cubes, and stir anti clockwise. Add the rest of the rum, two more ice cubes, stir clockwise. Pour apple juice into the top and sip gently.

The Layered Giraffe

In honour of Snapshot Serengeti, this was suggested by Zooniverse volunteer Emma Price.

• 1 shot Baileys
• 1 shot Amaretto
• 1 shot Kahlua

Pour each shot carefully into a glass, then shake cocoa powder on top in a suitably giraffey pattern. (Note this cocktail uses three of my four least favourite ingredients, so I haven’t tried it myself. Let me know how it goes).

The GitHub Gimlet

As many of you know, we lost our Technical Lead Arfon Smith to GitHub earlier this year. I’m pleased to see he’s working hard in his new role, contributing this gin gimlet recipe to an open source cocktail repository :

https://github.com/balevine/cocktails/pull/2/files

To make it a GitHub gimlet, add one single, solitary tear shed at our lost of Arfon and shake viciously.