Real Science Online - Classify Galaxies or Moon Craters at Galaxyzoo.org

By John McCormick  

Ever dream of doing REAL astronomy? Well Galaxyzoo enlists amateurs to help astronomers classify galactic images of distant objects according to their structure. Don't kid yourself; this is real astronomy everyone can participate in.

In addition to looking deep into space, you can also choose to study the lunar surface using photos from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter or watch for solar storms.

From todays press release: "Galaxyzoo puts real deep space images collected by the top telescopes (mainly The Hubble)

The new images are drawn from Hubble's COSMOS: The Cosmic Evolution Survey. These images, taken during 590 orbits of the Hubble Space Telescope, map out a 2 square-degree region of the sky.

These images are sensitive enough to see objects almost 100 times fainter than those that appeared in the original Galaxy Zoo. These images have been used to map out the distribution of dark matter and the large-scale structure of the universe.

Now, thanks to you, these images can extend our understanding of galaxy morphology out to more distant galaxies and down to fainter nearby galaxies."

Whether you don't have a powerful telescope of your own or are located in poor seeing conditions, Galaxyzoo.org lets you do real science online.

There is literally too much data for scientists to classify on their own so they welcome help from independent observers who can help narrow down the millions of images to those which deserve the most detailed analysis.

John McCormick is a reporter, /science/medical columnist and finance and social commentator, with 17,000+ bylined stories. Contact John through NewsBlaze.