Galaxy Zoo!

So, I've been in the throes of grant proposal writing, which as far as I can tell is the worst part of becoming a professor. As such, I've been ignoring as much of my email as humanly possible for the past week. Until I got an email from David Weinberg this afternoon, announcing to the SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey) mailing list the arrival of a new web-based galaxy classification project, Galaxy Zoo. The project was started by some scientists with SDSS, including Alex Szalay and Bob Nichol, and others. They had a press release today, and it's already been covered by the BBC and was picked up by AP, so I think the website has gotten a bit hammered in the first day. The basic idea here is to harness the collective eyes and brains of the internet to visually classify galaxies by morphology. It turns out that galaxy ...