Astronomy at home

If you’re looking for a constructive way to use your critical thinking skills in your spare time, then I have some good news for you: Galaxy Zoo wants your help!

In partnership with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Galaxy Zoo is looking for volunteers to help with image processing: identifying what types of galaxies SDSS has seen, and trying to understand how observed galaxy collisions may have happened. It might seem like these jobs would be a perfect application for computers. Actually, image identification is harder than you’d think – if it wasn’t, Captcha would be useless – and collision simulations are very cumbersome programs to run. The human eye (with brain attached) is a better tool for these sorts of problems, if you can get enough eyes (and brains) working together on all the data. And that’s exactly what Galaxy Zoo was set up for.

No scientific background is necessary. There are very helpful and easy-to-understand tutorials on how to answer the questions they’ll ask about each image. All you really need is your eyes, and you’ll be contributing to astrophysics research in no time. So go help out!

(Thanks to Elles for posting about this over at Teen Skepchick.)

December 2, 2009 · Written by
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