Galaxy Zoo

= Citizen Science project in astronomy, part of the Zooniverse

URL = http://galaxyzoo.org/

Description

Dave Munger:

"Galaxy Zoo is an effort to classify about 250,000 galaxies that were imaged by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey over the past eight years. Once I created an account, I was immediately presented with a stunning image of a galaxy and asked to decide whether it was a “smooth” galaxy devoid of apparent structure or a “featured” galaxy with topological characteristics like spirals or bars. Having never done this, I wasn’t exactly sure how to proceed, but help pages were readily available. After checking the help page, I clicked “smooth.”

Next I was asked if the galaxy was round, cigar-shaped, or somewhere in between. I clicked “in between,” and the next screen asked if there was anything odd about this galaxy. Although it seemed odd indeed that I was being trusted to do this important work, I clicked “no” and moved on to the next galaxy. Within a few minutes, I had classified a half-dozen galaxies—not a bad contribution to science for someone whose only astronomical experience was an “intro to astrophysics” course taken over 20 years ago as a college freshman!

But how does a project like Galaxy Zoo ensure that participants aren’t taking shortcuts or fudging data? Alexander Bastidas Fry, a graduate student in astronomy at the University of Washington, explains how the site works on his blog The Astronomist. Since participants must register with the site, it’s possible to track their classifications and compare them to the work of others. Each galaxy is classified many times, and the work of long-established, accurate contributors is compared to newbies. Unreliable users’ classifications are weighted lower, while more consistent users earn a higher weight. The results are statistically more accurate than those obtained from professional astronomers—even though the experts in the field rarely use their limited time to classify a quarter-million galaxies." (http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/creating_citizen_scientists/)