...It's a galaxy zoo out there!

Posted by melmoo in Blog & Internet, Pictures, Science & Tech on November 18, 2008 at 2:28 am


For those of you (like me!) who look up into the night sky pondering hoping for the existence of alien civilizations in faraway galaxies here’s something to bring it all a little closer to home.

Galaxy Zoo.org is a volunteer scientific project that enlists the aid of volunteers who are asked to classify images of galaxies that were taken by a robotic telescope as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. It’s quite likely that the galaxies captured have not been observed before by any human eyes! In reality the figure is probably closer to 20 other pairs of eyes as all images are seen several separate volunteers for accurate classification of each galaxy.

The reasoning behind use of human volunteers is according to Galaxy Zoo project member Kevin Schawinski largely thanks to: “The human brains (is) actually much better than a computer at these pattern-recognition tasks” (humans: 1; computers: 1000101).

There’s a tutorial showing how to classify galaxies according to shape (elliptical, spiral or irregular) and rotation (clockwise or anti-clockwise).

If you’re lucky you might discover something completely novel like Hanny’s Voorwerp (which looks like a dancing alien in this APOD image) or something more disturbing.

Permalink at Galaxy Zoo.org


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COMMENT

9 comments to "...It's a galaxy zoo out there!"

  1. field
    November 18th, 2008 at 3:38 am

    very good!

  2. RubenCovex
    November 18th, 2008 at 8:09 am

    Nope...no galaxies here. It's all just swamp gas :P

  3. Rocky Rook
    November 18th, 2008 at 9:01 am

    Alf! I hate that thing.

  4. MENLOHEAVYWEIGHT
    November 18th, 2008 at 10:29 am

    Alf yes that is much more disturbing

  5. noahstrickland
    November 18th, 2008 at 10:29 am

    APOD is the shit.

    also, I remember seeing this site a couple of years ago and not being a big fan of the interface, etc...

  6. sam
    November 18th, 2008 at 1:17 pm

    "the galaxies captured have not been observed before by any earthling eyes!"

    Fixed.

  7. Paula
    November 18th, 2008 at 1:33 pm

    That site is really something! I've been working with SDSS for my work and at a point I had to classify almost ten thousand galaxies by eye. A little help would be greatly appreciated! :)

  8. Ali S.
    November 18th, 2008 at 5:53 pm

    I've been a part of the community of Galaxy Zoo for a good while. I can't count how many galaxies I've helped classify. Hundreds perhaps! :) Nice to see it getting more recognition!

  9. stormie24
    November 18th, 2008 at 11:44 pm

    this is a really cool concept...I'll have to start classifying soon :o )


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