A galaxy of helpful people
When Dr Chris Lintott, a researcher in the department of physics at the University of Oxford, first considered launching a website to ask the public to help classify photographs of 1m galaxies, he assumed it would probably take three or four years to complete. Galaxy Zoo (galaxyzoo.org), launched in July 2007, was supposed to be a side project; instead it has turned into the biggest citizen-science experiment on the web.Galaxies can be classified as spiral, elliptical or merging (when two come together). The Sloan Digital Sky Survey, or SDSS (www.sdss.org), has images of nearly a million galaxies; what those images don't have in their raw form is the information about what class of galaxy is pictured.Lintott had hoped that each image would get 10 classifications, or "clicks", and that the public would prove able to classify galaxies accurately according to their features. Three weeks and 10m clicks later, he was...
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