Zooniverse
is a program in which amateur astronomers,
students, and members of the general public
are invited to become citizen scientists
in which they participate directly in leading
edge science projects. Typically this involves
taking advantage of the human mind's extraordinary
powers of pattern recognition and novelty
detection to help sift through gigantic
data sets of mostly uninteresting stuff
to find the small number of signals of interest.
For example, one of the latest Zooniverse
projects is The
Milky Way Project:
The Milky Way Project aims to
sort and measure our galaxy, the Milky Way.
Initially we're asking you to help us find
and draw bubbles in beautiful infrared data
from the Spitzer Space Telescope. Understanding
the cold, dusty material that we see in
these images, helps scientists to learn
how stars form and how our galaxy changes
and evolves with time.
Some of their other projects:
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Look
for planets orbiting other stars using
NASA's
Kepler mission data. |
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"Solar
scientists need you! Help them spot
explosions on the Sun and track them
across space to Earth. Your work will
give astronauts an early warning if
dangerous solar radiation is headed
their way. And you could make a new
scientific discovery." |
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"Explore
the Moon in unprecedented detail using
images from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance
Orbiter." |
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"Help
astronomers figure out how galaxies
form and evolve by classifying their
shape. Now with added Hubble galaxies." |
Find out more about these and other projects
at Zooniverse.org.
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