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We present the largest, most homogeneous catalogue of merging galaxies in the nearby Universe obtained through the Galaxy Zoo project – an interface on the World Wide Web enabling large‐scale morphological classification of galaxies through visual inspection of images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). The method converts a set of visually inspected classifications for each galaxy into a single parameter (the ‘weighted‐merger‐vote fraction,’ f  m ) which describes our confidence that the system is part of an ongoing merger. We describe how  f  m  is used to create a catalogue of 3003 visually selected pairs of merging galaxies from the SDSS in the redshift range  0.005 &lt;  z  &lt; 0.1 . We use our merger sample and values of  f  m  applied to the SDSS Main Galaxy Spectral sample to estimate that the fraction of volume‐limited  ( M r   &lt; −20.55)  major mergers  (1/3 &lt;  M * 1 / M * 2  &lt; 3)  in the nearby Universe is  1–3 × C  per cent,  where   C ∼ 1.5  is a correction factor for spectroscopic incompleteness. Having visually classified the morphologies of the constituent galaxies in our mergers, we find that the spiral‐to‐elliptical ratio of galaxies in mergers is higher by a factor of ∼2 relative to the global population. In a companion paper, we examine the internal properties of these merging galaxies and conclude that this high spiral‐to‐elliptical ratio in mergers is due to a longer time‐scale over which mergers with spirals are detectable compared to mergers with ellipticals.

Galaxy Zoo: the fraction of merging galaxies in the SDSS and their morphologies