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.
Planet Hunters is a Citizen Science project, aiming to analyze the slew of data from the Kepler Space Telescope. Planet Hunters look for transit signals in the data, which cause the light from the star to dim periodically.This project is designed to complement the efforts of other scientists to analyze the data using computer algorithms. This paper presents results of the first two planet candidates to be identified using this method, demonstrating that this type of citizen science project is a valuable tool for exoplanet detection.
The 2017 solar eclipse will provide a unique opportunity to launch some exciting citizen science. This white paper describes how!