galaxies!

[jinian]

Apparently 70,000 of the cool kids knew about this a couple of weeks ago, but I only discovered Galazy Zoo in Science News yesterday. It is incredibly cool, like Distributed Proofreaders (which I did years ago when there were only a couple hundred completed!) only for pictures of very distant galaxies. The computers have flagged bodies/photos that they think look like galaxies, but humans are way better at classifying by shape and sorting out the few errors that make it in. And, amazingly, by the time I found out about this, we were already kind of done -- at least one person had looked at each picture and classified it.

The next goal is for 20 people to look at each photo to give a good sample of classifications, so go sign up! There's an easy tutorial, a competence exam, and a million galaxies to see. For an idea of the OMG factor, check out the forum thread on mergers. I admit there are also a lot of orange blobs, but it's worth it.

ETA: Ooh.

Comments

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

Wow, that is really so cool. I *heart* the internet! Getting day-to-day people involved in massive astronomy undertakings and having pictures like this freely available is amazing. I am imagining past generations of astronomers crying for joy in astronomer heaven or something :)

The bit about clockwise vs counterclockwise was interesting, that maybe something big that we don't currently understand is up? I wonder where that will go?