I visited earlier to find nobody needing any help, so having watched "The Sky at Night" earlier this evening (the longest running UK TV series), I decided to sign up as a galaxy identifier, and have spent the evening helping out.
The task is to go through the image of the whole northern sky and classify the 100,000,000 galaxies in the image by type.
The astronomers involved realized that the enormity of the task spread between the entire world population of professionals would be the work of several lifetimes, and computer analysis of images actually takes many times longer than the human brain's abilities in pattern recognition, so the've started the project mentioned in the thread title.
Members of the public (that includes you) are invited to register.
After a short tutorial teaching you the types, you're given a short test to see if you've understood, and provided that you pass the test (8/15 is the pass mark), you're allowed to participate.
You'll be presented with previously unclassified items from the image, and you have to click on the appropriate button to identify them.
You can do as few or as many as you have time for, whenever you have a spare moment (when this forum is slack for example).
I believe they were astonished by the response when they set it up and now have over 100,000 volunteers classifying away.
One particular member (a Dutch girl called Hannah) was featured on TV tonight because she discovered something on one image which was so mystifying that several of the worlds largest telescopes have been investigating it, and even the Hubble Space Telescope has been booked to join the investigation (when they fix it on the next shuttle mission)
Why not register and maybe you'll find something that will add your name to the ranks of Halley, Swift, Tuttle, Hale, Bopp, Shumaker and Levi, in having something up there named after you !
The task is to go through the image of the whole northern sky and classify the 100,000,000 galaxies in the image by type.
The astronomers involved realized that the enormity of the task spread between the entire world population of professionals would be the work of several lifetimes, and computer analysis of images actually takes many times longer than the human brain's abilities in pattern recognition, so the've started the project mentioned in the thread title.
Members of the public (that includes you) are invited to register.
After a short tutorial teaching you the types, you're given a short test to see if you've understood, and provided that you pass the test (8/15 is the pass mark), you're allowed to participate.
You'll be presented with previously unclassified items from the image, and you have to click on the appropriate button to identify them.
You can do as few or as many as you have time for, whenever you have a spare moment (when this forum is slack for example).
I believe they were astonished by the response when they set it up and now have over 100,000 volunteers classifying away.
One particular member (a Dutch girl called Hannah) was featured on TV tonight because she discovered something on one image which was so mystifying that several of the worlds largest telescopes have been investigating it, and even the Hubble Space Telescope has been booked to join the investigation (when they fix it on the next shuttle mission)
Why not register and maybe you'll find something that will add your name to the ranks of Halley, Swift, Tuttle, Hale, Bopp, Shumaker and Levi, in having something up there named after you !