[AZ-Observing] Armchair Galaxy-Spotting

FYI.
Stan

If you can tell a star from a galaxy, astronomers at Portsmouth and 
Oxford universities in the United Kingdom and Johns Hopkins University 
in the United States would like you and your computer to help classify 
about a million images from the robotic Sloan Digital Sky Survey 
telescope at Apache Point Observatory in Sunspot, New Mexico.

Volunteers are invited to go to www.galaxyzoo.org 
<http://www.galaxyzoo.org> to see pictures of galaxies, "most of which 
have never been viewed by human eyes before," according to a statement 
on the Web site. Participants will categorize each image as spiral, 
elliptical, star/don't know, or mergers. The spiral galaxies are then 
subdivided into clockwise, anticlockwise, and edge-on.

"The human brain is actually better than a computer at pattern 
recognition tasks like this," says Oxford astrophysicist Kevin 
Schawinski. Astrophysicist Bob Nichol of Portsmouth adds that getting 
the galaxies classified is "as fundamental as knowing if a human is male 
or female."

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