[AZ-Observing] Re: Armchair Galaxy-Spotting
- From: Stan Gorodenski <stan_gorodenski@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: az-observing@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 02 Oct 2007 07:17:01 -0700
Jimmy,
I'm glad you and the others really like this. Instead of getting
infested with chiggers on a hot summer night you can "observe" in the
coolness of your home with a lemonade or beer, and on a freezing night
you can "observe" in your cozy warm home with a hot chocolate. :-)
It seems the originators of this project may have hit on a technique to
get amateurs really into astronomy and 'observing' of a sorts.
Stan
Jimmy Ray wrote:
Stan,
This thing is completely E-V-I-L !!! I have clasified will over a Bizzilion
and still can't tear myself away from this thing. Sure there is a lot of
C-R-A-P to look through but then one pops up that takes your breath away,
spurring on the search for the next little wonder out there. I haven't
looked at how many passes the images take thought the classification process
but for all I know I'm the only one how as ever seen image "X" ever! (love
this thing)
Jimmy Ray
(I'm sure Brian Skiff is thinking that he's just found a poor shmuck to go
though a pile of data they have but no one wants to do...(put it on line,
throw in a T-shirt and a box of Twinkie's and I just might ;-)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Stan Gorodenski" <stan_gorodenski@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "AZ-Observing" <az-observing@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Monday, September 24, 2007 11:05
Subject: [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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