Astronomy Program Expands Scope
A few weeks ago we reported on a new astronomy project called
GalaxyZoo, a joint project of the University of Portsmouth, Oxford
University, and Johns Hopkins University whose goal is to classify
about a million galaxies using help from volunteers over the Internet.
According to organizers, the effort has been so successful that it's
now being expanded.
The goal of the project is to identify and classify galaxies all over
the universe and create a distribution map of galaxies by their type.
Volunteers look at images captured by the 142 megapixel camera mounted
on a 8.2-foot telescope in New Mexico used in the Sloan Digital Sky
Survey and simply identify them as spiral, elliptical, or merging
galaxies.
The original goal had been to get volunteers to classify an initial 1
million images, most of which had never been seen by human eyes prior
to the project. Now the organization said that about 80,000 volunteers
have participated in the program, classifying more than 10 million
images.
The new goal, now, is for volunteers to cross-classify the images so
that each one will have been classified by at least 20 people in order
to help ensure accuracy.
The GalaxyZoo site has also been expanded to include forums and a "My
Galaxies" feature that allows users to review images they have
previously classified and share them with others.
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