Galaxy spotting

A couple of months ago, I was invited to attend a seminar on the public engagement with science (what used to be called the public understanding of science or “outreach”) which was very informative and, in parts, entertaining.

One of the speakers, a gent from the USA, described a project to use the expertise of humans to help analyse visual scientific data. People were not expected to understand the science per se, but were invited to use their visual pattern recognition skills to look at photographs and classify them in a limited taxonomy, something that computers, no matter how powerful, are not yet able to do.

Yesterday, I was made aware (courtesy of BBC News 24) of the Galaxy Zoo project that uses this method of distributed analysis to help the project examine photographs of galaxies and other cosmic phenomenon from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) using their dedicated 2.5m telescope on Apache Point in New Mexico.

The press release describes the project:

Astronomers are inviting members of the public to help them make major new discoveries by taking part in a census of one million galaxies.

Visitors to www.galaxyzoo.org will get to see stunning images of galaxies, most of which have never been viewed by human eyes before. By sorting these images into “spiral galaxies” (like our own Milky Way) or “elliptical galaxies”, visitors will help astronomers to understand the structure of the universe. The new digital images were taken using the robotic Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope in New Mexico.

If you have an interest in astronomy and have a few minutes a day to spare (no matter your level of expertise—try your hand at the tutorial) you can help out the project’s astronomers by looking at a few galaxies and helping to classifying them. Some of the photos are a little blurry (well, they are thousands if not millions of light years away!) but all they ask for is your best guess, don’t agonise over any particular classification.

At the time of writing, the project seems to have been very successful and has attracted a lot of interest from the public, resulting in the server being slow on occasion. I expect that they’re planning to ramp up their load balancing to cope with the success and popularity.

I dare anyone who takes anything more than a few minutes to look at these photographs to not appreciate the sheer immensity and majesty of the universe.

I guess die-hard creationists need not apply.

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