Galaxy Zoo

Well I was looking through the news again today and found this site that was opened up to the public this morning. It is called Galaxy Zoo. This is a site that is asking for volunteers to help sort out galaxies, whether they are spiral, elliptical, merging, or not galaxies at all. They want volunteers because they can have multiple people clarify the same galaxies to make sure it is correct and if necessary a scientist will clarify it. There are millions of pictures so it'd take a lot of time to go through them all and a computer program may not be as accurate.

The cool thing is that we can see these great images of space that many haven't been seen before. You can save them and print them out if you'd like. There will eventually be a discussion forum and eventually be able to see how good of an astronomer you are. The more volunteers they have, the faster it will be to clarify all the pictures. This is the first project of it's type that I've heard of but I guess it's similar to projects by NASA that clarifies Star Dust.

Even though I sort of feel like they are using us to save them time, I still think it's cool to look through the images. If you get bored you can stop or you can go at it for days. I went through the tutorial to make sure I knew what I was doing and now I've started analyzing the galaxies. I've seen some pretty interesting pictures.