If you look further and further out, you'll see many galaxies, and even more galaxies beyond that, as seen in this super long exposure from the Hubble Space Telescope.
It turns out that even recognizing what is a galaxy and not a galaxy is difficult for computers to sort out, never mind trying to properly sort galaxies by type and properties. So who watches these galaxies?
(This is the tenth Astronomy 210L laboratory at Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, CA. This course is a one-semester, optional adjunct laboratory to the Astronomy 210 introductory astronomy lecture, taken primarily by students to satisfy their general education science transfer requirement.)
Crowdsourcing is the ability to harness the collective behavior (altruistic and/or compulsive) of people to organize and sort information for little or no compensation.
The GalaxyZoo project is designed to harness the power of crowdsourcing to do the preliminary identification and sorting of galaxies.
To participate in this crowdsourcing project, you do need to become a "certified" galaxy sorter, and go through a tutorial to properly train you. Don't stress about being able to pass the galaxy sorting test, if you fail, you can always try again.
Once certified, you can access the entire GalaxyZoo data base, and participate in identifying and sorting galaxies, and also formulate research questions that can be answered with this data.
If you look further and further out, you'll see many galaxies, and even more galaxies beyond that, as seen in this super long exposure from the Hubble Space Telescope. 
It turns out that even recognizing what is a galaxy and not a galaxy is difficult for computers to sort out, never mind trying to properly sort galaxies by type and properties. So who watches these galaxies? 
(This is the tenth Astronomy 210L laboratory at Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, CA. This course is a one-semester, optional adjunct laboratory to the Astronomy 210 introductory astronomy lecture, taken primarily by students to satisfy their general education science transfer requirement.)
Crowdsourcing is the ability to harness the collective behavior (altruistic and/or compulsive) of people to organize and sort information for little or no compensation. 
The GalaxyZoo project is designed to harness the power of crowdsourcing to do the preliminary identification and sorting of galaxies. 
To participate in this crowdsourcing project, you do need to become a "certified" galaxy sorter, and go through a tutorial to properly train you. Don't stress about being able to pass the galaxy sorting test, if you fail, you can always try again.
Once certified, you can access the entire GalaxyZoo data base, and participate in identifying and sorting galaxies, and also formulate research questions that can be answered with this data.
2 comments:
Astronomy 210L, Spring Semester 2011
Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, CA
Online post-lab assignment 9
Discuss the most interesting aspect of this lab, and explain why this was personally interesting for you.
The following are a sampling of the student responses to this question, verbatim and unedited.
"being able to contribute to mapping out and identifying the unknown parts of the galaxy"
"Finding out the different categories of galaxies was interesting, like how astronomers and scientists divide them up by clockwise and anti-clockwise."
"seeing all the different types of galaxies, and which are more common than others"
"Earning my Galaxy Licence!"
"i thought it was cool that any normal joe could log in and help astronomical research."
"discussing the different perspective between the students"
"the most interesting aspect was to know that there are only 3 types of galaxies"
"the galaxy shapes"
"looking at all the types of galaxies was interesting"
"Knowing that we are contributing to science!"
"learning to identify galaxies"
"seeing the different types of galaxies"
"The most interesting aspect of this lab was seeing pictures of galaxies and knowing we can help identify them."
"seeing the differences in spiral galaxies"
"everything was great"
"Looking at all the different galaxies."
"It was cool to look at the pictures of galaxies"
"It was fun learning about the different kinds of colors and shapes"
"im not sure"
"identifying the different types of galaxies"
"was trying to identify the different types of galaxies"
"The most interesting part of this lab was guessing the kind of galaxy it was and getting all of them right!"
"That we are part of an exclusive group of people that got 15 out of 15."
"Forming the question, when youre put in the position of making the question instead of answering it its always interesting."
"Discovering the differences between different galaxies and their shapes."
"Identifying galaxies"
"It's a cool concept to take the burden off scientists and let the astronomy loving community become involved."
"I liked looking at the pictures of merging galaxies."
"the whole concept of galaxyzoo was pretty interesting to me"
"The entire lab was interesting"
"Everything"
"The most interesting aspect was learning what the different galaxies and stars looked like."
"I enjoyed using the graphs."
"How thing that are so different but so hard to tell the difference"
"Learning what is happening with the stars"
"differentiating the types of galaxy's"
"learning how to identify galaxies"
"I liked this lab because we tried to identify whether the pictures were spiral gallaxies,spiral on edge, unclear, elliptical and etc...."
"Looking at all the pictures and passing the test."
"the different types of galaxies"
"I like the lab project today. Sorting through the pictures and trying to figure them out was very interesting"
"it was interesting to classify the stars i suppose."
"Seeing the two different types of galaxies that are out there."
"The Galaxies are pretty"
"The most interesting aspect of this lab was trying to figure out the different galaxies."
"I liked using Galazy Zoo.com"
"The website was really cool, I liked seeing all the different galaxies!!"
"The different types of galaxies"
"it would have been looking at other pics"
"i liked viewing the pictures."
Astronomy 210L, Spring Semester 2011
Cuesta College, San Luis Obispo, CA
Online post-lab assignment 9
Discuss the most confusing aspect of this lab, and explain why this was personally confusing for you.
The following are a sampling of the student responses to this question, verbatim and unedited.
"The lab was pretty simple, coming up with a solid research question was difficult."
"The only thing that was difficult was with blurry images and determing how to classify them."
"nothing was confusing"
"Merging vs normal galaxies?"
"figuring out what some of the spiral galaxies were."
"detailing the given information"
"galaxies that were both spiral and elliptical"
"some of the images are fuzzy and hard to tell which type of galaxy they are"
"Sometimes identifying galaxies were difficult."
"distinguishing between elliptical and spiral galaxies"
"determining an edge on galaxy"
"Mergers were difficult."
"some of the images were blurring and hard to tell what they were."
"nothing was confusing"
"This lab was not confusing."
"It wasn't confusing"
"not sure"
"answering the question on are most galaxies are elliptical because our data was not clear cut on disagreeing or agreeing"
"the question on agreeing if most galaxies are elliptical because our evidence was not really clear on which way to go"
"There wasn't anything confusing about this lab."
"Sometimes the pictures seemed really far away and were hard to see."
"Making the question in the end, its much harder than it seems. Choosing a topic and figuring out how to solve it."
"differentiating between the galaxies, finding out which one is which."
"distinguishing between the diffent stars and galaxies."
"I didn't get confused. Some of the pictures we were asked to classify were difficult but it wasn't necessarily confusing."
"Some of the pictures were really blurry, this made it hard to understand what was suppose to be going on."
"this lab wasnt confusing"
"Nothing was confusing"
"Nothing"
"I did not think this lab was confusing."
"I thought it was difficult understanding what some of the questions were asking."
"Nothing"
"telling if what is happening with the stars"
"identifying elliptical galaxy's"
"trying to determine if it was an elliptical galaxy or not"
"The lab itself wasn't confusing just time consuming."
"The internet connection."
"how were all the different types of galaxies formed"
"Trying to figure out some of the pictures got confusing"
"looking at the different classifications for too long and starting to have trouble identifying them."
"Nothing was confusing during this lab."
"Nothing was that confusing"
"The most confusing part was trying to figure out an elliptical galaxy from a spiral galaxy."
"I didn't like when Galaxy Zoo.com stopped working :/"
"The clockwise/counterclock was was a bit confusing!"
"Clock-wise or counter clock-wise rotation on spiral galaxies"
"didnt find any thing confusing"
"getting the people in my group to do any work"
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