Help Wanted: Galaxy Classifiers - No Experience Needed
The pay is not that great (non-existent in fact) and there are no job-related benefits (other than knowing that you are making a contribution to science), but a public call for help from a team of scientists from the US and the UK in classifying nearly a million galaxies has been nothing short of a cosmic phenomenon. By taking part, you'll not only be contributing to scientific research, but you'll view parts of the Universe that literally no-one has ever seen before.
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<b>I can't stop!</b> 8O
In the interest of promoting their effort, I've copied an e-mail I received from Galaxy Zoo talking about their progress:<br><br>Hello<br><br>This is the first email newsletter from www.galaxyzoo.org . We wanted<br>to thank you all for making the first three weeks such a success, and<br>so we're sending this to all 80,000 of you. If you'd like to opt out of<br>future emails, see the unsubscribe instructions below.<br><br>PROJECT UPDATE<br><br>To date, unbelievably, 80,000 of you have viewed and classified more than 10 million<br>images of galaxies. Our initial target of having each galaxy (there are<br>a million in our initial sample from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey)<br>viewed once is more than done, but we still need your help. Our NEW<br>target is to have each and every galaxy classified by 20 separate<br>users.<br><br>The importance of multiple classifications is that it will enable us to<br>build an accurate and reliable database, that will meet the high<br>standards of the scientific community. For the first time, we'll be<br>able to separate not only spirals from ellipticals, but obvious spirals<br>from fainter, fuzzier things. No-one has ever been able to do this<br>before, so we hope that you'll continue to search through our galaxies<br>and enjoy the ride.<br><br>Thanks as well to everyone who has emailed us with an interesting<br>object, or posted on the forum (see below). We're slowly working<br>through the list, and the first objects have now been sent off to<br>telescopes for follow-up work to begin. The ability to follow up on<br>objects identified by you, our users, is one of the most amazing things<br>about Galaxy Zoo and we're looking forward to sharing the results.<br>Hopefully it's also a motivation to look at 'just one more' galaxy when<br>you're using the site.<br><br><br>MY GALAXIES AND THE FORUM ARE LIVE<br><br>The long-awaited Galaxy Zoo forum is now online at<br>www.galaxyzooforum.org (or just follow the link from the main site).<br>Please come and join those members sharing their greatest images, or<br>talking about their experiences in the galaxy zoo.<br><br>Many of you have also noticed that the 'My Galaxies' link on the Galaxy<br>Analysis page is now live, so you can trawl back through the galaxies<br>you've classified in the last week or so and share the best with your<br>friends and those on the forum.<br><br>That's all for now, but we're working hard on making the most of your<br>classifications to date, and planning new projects with which you can<br>explore the Universe further. If you haven't been back to the site for<br>a while, please come and help us reach our new target of 20 million<br>classifications. It's only another 100 or so galaxies each!<br><br>The Galaxy Zoo team.<br>
Funding Member
