Galaxy Zoo

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You might have already heard about distributed research, projects like Seti@home and Folding@home, you install some software and your computer works for science. It's a way of passively helping out.

I recently found out about this very nice project called Galaxy Zoo which is a bit the same except that the participants act as active researchers. It seems that with all these new telescopes and probes and things like that, the amount of information that needs to be analyzed is enormous. The idea is to send out images to the participants for them to classify the images, this helps the filtering process by a lot, astronomers can work with sorted images.

Results have been published and recently Galaxy Zoo 2 has help publish a paper. The idea is great, people putting together their efforts to do things.. hmm, rings a bell. In all this you get to see rare images and be yourself a part of the findings.

So instead of clicking on sites like "hot or not" in your spare time, do something useful and head to one of the Galaxy Zoo sites, oh yeah I didn't mention, this seems to be very fruitful so there are a few variants, including the new Solar Storm Watch.. (I love a good solar storm!!).

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