Mysteries So Bright

Galaxy Zoo This is neat – found on Visual Astronomy – it uses volunteers to classify a large database of newly-found galaxies.

The history line says “The original Galaxy Zoo was launched in July 2007, with a data set made up of a million galaxies imaged with the robotic telescope of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. With so many galaxies, the team thought that it might take at least two years for visitors to the site to work through them all. Within 24 hours of launch, the site was receiving 70,000 classifications an hour, and more than 50 million classifications were received by the project during its first year, from almost 150,000 people.”

I just joined and hope to spend some time contributing. Anyone can do it. A tutorial is included. And your classification is checked against other observers to help prevent mistakes.