How good are citizen-scientists at characterizing crater densities and size distributions on the lunar surface? For that matter how good are the experts? Today’s study attempts to answer these questions by having a group of experts analyze images of the Moon from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera.
Finding circumstellar disks in the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer data is a tough job, but fortunately our brains are even better suited to the task than computers! You can help by lending your pattern-recognition skills to Disk Detective, the Zooniverse’s newest citizen science project.
Observing dark worlds is a public competition for improving algorithms to find dark matter halos in weak gravitational lensing maps. Today, we discuss citizen science projects and describe the results of the challenge.
Galaxy Zoo is a citizen science project that uses volunteers to classify galaxies from the Sloan Digitial Sky Survey as spiral or elliptical. Now the Galaxy Zoo 2 catalogue has gone public, with even more detailed classifications of galaxies, including bars, bulges, spiral arms, and round and squashed ellipticals.
Ever wondered what it’s like to merge galaxies? The authors of the Galaxy Zoo project have created a way that you can find out… and do science while you’re at it!
Kevin Schawinski of Yale University, co-founder of the Galaxy Zoo project, explains how to use crowd sourcing to make sense of enormous data sets.