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One of the telescopes at the observatory where my wife works is the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. (wiki entry) It has collected a HUGE amount of data in the years that it has been operating, and they've started a "@home" project to help identify characteristics of galaxies.
"They are asking volunteers on the Internet to help classify the galaxies as either elliptical or spiral and note, where possible, in which direction they rotate."
You go through a tutorial to train you to help identify galaxy characteristics and what direction it is rotating, then you go off identifying from photos. Lots of other people are doing the same thing on the same images that you're looking at, so it's a preponderance of votes that gets the galaxy classified, this also dampens the effect of someone going in and classifying everything as counterclockwise to try and throw everything off.
Anyway, I thought that there's enough science geeks who read my blog that might find this interesting to do.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/07/12/galaxy.internet.ap/index.html
"They are asking volunteers on the Internet to help classify the galaxies as either elliptical or spiral and note, where possible, in which direction they rotate."
You go through a tutorial to train you to help identify galaxy characteristics and what direction it is rotating, then you go off identifying from photos. Lots of other people are doing the same thing on the same images that you're looking at, so it's a preponderance of votes that gets the galaxy classified, this also dampens the effect of someone going in and classifying everything as counterclockwise to try and throw everything off.
Anyway, I thought that there's enough science geeks who read my blog that might find this interesting to do.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/07/12/galaxy.internet.ap/index.html
