The Galaxy Zoo

I came across an extraordinary endeavour the other day - the Galaxy Zoo is the biggest citizen-science experiment on the web, dedicated to helping scientists classify 1,000,000 photographs collected from various telescopes (on earth and in space) for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS).

The project was started in July 2007 by Dr. Chris Lintott, a science researcher from the University of Oxford, as a solution to this huge task. By asking the public to help, the manpower resources increased enormously. The participation rate is measured by ‘clicks’ on the website, and has now topped 70 million clicks. Initially people were asked to identify galaxies as being spiral, elliptical or merging categories, and the success is such that Lintott says “ You can have confidence, as we say, ‘100% of people think that that’s a spiral galaxy, so its really, really spirally’.”

Such is the success of the operation, participants have now been asked to apply a far more extensive range of criteria for classifying the galaxies they see in the photos in a new project - Galaxy Zoo 2.

Stories abound. Try out the ‘The Voorwerp’ for a discovery in the making.

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