My wife and I attended a friend’s wedding this past weekend. When I told the groom’s mother what I did, she let forth the following: “Oh, you work for Astronomy magazine?! My husband is totally hooked on the Galaxy Zoo Project!”
Turns out “totally hooked” is an understatement. Her husband told me he has cranked out thousands of galaxy classifications in the last 6 weeks. Each night, he sits at his computer, turns on some music, and gets crankin’.
Apparently, he's one of thousands of dedicated volunteers who've signed up to help professional astronomers classify galaxies by poring over Sloan Digital Sky Survey images.
Here's a brief summary of the project, excerpted from its web site:
"The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is taking images of a large portion of the sky and will eventually find a million galaxies. With such a large number of galaxies, astronomers can finally begin to understand how they form and evolve by comparing various populations to each other with large enough numbers to draw real conclusions about their origin.
"But out of these million galaxies, how do we know which are spirals and which are ellipticals? The answer is simple: look at them! Indeed, until now galaxies have been classified by visual inspection of their images. And in fact, technology is of little help here. It turns out that the human brain is far better than a computer at recognising (sic) the patterns that divide ellipticals from spirals. So visual inspection works well for a handful, or even several hundred objects....but one million? There are just too many galaxies for even the most dedicated of astronomers to look at. We need thousands of people to inspect galaxy images and to classify them as spiral or elliptical. We need you to help us."
This particular gentleman is a dentist, as is my wife, so I’m plenty confident that he’s detail-oriented, curious, and patient enough to take on this task.
Because of my sabbatical from Astronomy magazine, I’m not as dialed into this project. It sounds wonderful. Amateur astronomers contributing to the science of the hobby they love.
If you haven’t yet visited www.galaxyzoo.org, check it out. If you already volunteer, let us know if you’re a member of the 1,000-classification club, 10,000-classification club, or 100,000-classification club.
For more information about the Galaxy Zoo Project, read Astronomy magazine Associate Editor Daniel Pendick's article, "Galaxy Zoo finds universe is left-handed".