Hopefully by the time you read this we will be well on the way to what is becoming known as the “new normality”, and you will have had some time to venture outside, even if it is just for a short walk to smell the fresh air. It certainly feels like we are starting to enter our lovely long summertime now so even if things are still scary out there, the outside will at least start to feel a less threatening place. I sincerely hope that none of you not been directly affected by the awful virus, but I worry that some of you may have been – please stay safe and only do what you feel comfortable doing.
If you decide to stay inside and want something to do then I would love to invite you to help some scientists identify new galaxies and stars at Galaxy Zoo. This is a website setup to allow real researchers get help from the likes of your and I. Ordinarily scientists and researchers use powerful computers to number crunch the answers they need, and they can use spare processing capacity of our computers to help them as we saw last month.
However sometimes there are instances where good old-fashioned human decision making is simply better than any supercomputer and this is what I would like to look at this month.
www.zooniverse.org have a number of projects listed where scientist need your help, anything from helping find rural homes in Africa to expand electrical access through to identifying and classifying as yet undiscovered galaxies and, of course, its this latter that is close to my own heart. You can see all of the projects that are in need of help at www.zooniverse.org/projects – why not spend some locked down time helping out on your favourite project?
If you want to help discover new galaxies, then fire up your computer and visit the following site…
www.zooniverse.org/projects/zookeeper/galaxy-zoo/classify
…there is a tutorial to help but essentially it’s a game of match the shape to the options, you will be shown a photograph of a yet unclassified astro image and then you’ll be asked a number of simple questions about it (is the image smooth, have features or is a disk, is it a star or artifact) – each of the questions has an example of what the scientists are looking for. Once you’ve answered the first question there will be 2 or 3 follow up questions and when you’re done, you’ll be presented with another image. Spend as much or as little time as you like – whatever you do will help scientists make new and exciting discoveries about our universe (or whatever project you decide to participate in, of course).