Galaxy Zoo 2

These past couple of weeks, I’ve been blogging about developing cyber initiatives and grants being given to fund projects that designed to generate and display data like never before. In fact, the words “revolutionary data collection” kept popping up again and again. But in most of the articles I’ve been reading about developing projects, no one ever really delves into what, exactly, will be done with the massive amount of data that will be collected; no one ever mentions how the data could be used – just that it will be utilized in “revolutionary” ways. With this in mind, this week I set out to find an example of something revolutionary – or at the very least something cool and interesting – that was being done with digital data.

My search led me to the zoo, the Galaxy Zoo, that is. Galaxy Zoo is a site that invites the public to help classify millions of galaxies using data and images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey at the Apache Point Observatory in New Mexico. All of the images come from a digital camera which is mounted on a telescope.



I think this is really neat. People like you and me can help classify and study the universe, no prior knowledge of astronomy needed (or so claims Wikipedia). The original Galaxy Zoo first made its debut in 2007 “with a data set made up of a million galaxies imaged with the robotic telescope of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey”; the new version, Galaxy Zoo 2, launched back in February of this year. According to their website, within the first day of Galaxy Zoo’s launch the site was getting 70,000 classifications an hour; during the first year over 50 million classifications were received from nearly 150,000 people.

Galaxy Zoo 2 has focused on almost a quarter of a million of the “nearest, brightest and most beautiful galaxies” for users to view and classify. Apparently, new discoveries by the amateur astronomers at Galaxy Zoo are being made constantly about galaxy colors, shapes and patterns. Professional telescopes (and I’m assuming professional astronomers along with them) have even followed up on some of the Galaxy Zoo findings; the list of professionals includes “the Isaac Newton and William Herschel Telescopes on the island of La Palma in the Canaries, Gemini South in Chile, the WIYN telescope on Kitt Peak, Arizona, the IRAM radio telescope in Spain’s Sierra Nevada, the Swift and GALEX satellites, and the Hubble Space Telescope.”

I've been playing around with the website's classification tutorial page, and I have to say that it is pretty fun. This is a great example of the neat things that can be accomplished with crowd-sourcing and open data. Regular people with an interest in astronomy having access to data to classify galaxies, make discoveries, and help figure things out about the universe; Galaxy Zoo 2 may not be mind-blowingly revolutionary but it definitely fit into the cool and interesting category.