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GalaxyZoo 2 for you and you and you

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GalaxyZoo2 just launched. If you weren’t aware of GalaxyZoo the original, you’re way behind the times, man. But never mind, time now to catch up. GalaxyZoo is every amateur astronomer’s dream – a chance to spot and characterise new planetary objects from a swathe of data that scientists just don’t have the time to analyse.

The data set is from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, and includes almost a quarter of a million galaxies.

The project in its initial guise became a bit of a media celebrity, which we pointed TGB readers to last year, when Hanny Van Arkel discovered an unknown, unique astronomical object. Van Arkel attributed her inspiration for taking part in the project to rock music.

The old version of GalaxyZoo asked participants to classify objects as either elliptical or spiral, but now things have got tougher. The Zoo wants more. So during a trawl of the images available from the website, you will now be asked to say what shape the thing you’ve spotted is. Not only what shape, but how much of that shape it is – so if it’s round – how round? These are taxing questions.

There is much rejoicing about the site’s launch over at the accompanying blog, and media coverage has taken up the nicely placed PR bait of asking whether you want to be involved in “writing the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy”.

Well if you do, or even if you don’t and just fancy a go at astronomical classification, or better still, a brush with fame, now is your chance. Oh, and GalaxyZoo isn’t the only chance for you to play your part. Other amateur astronomy projects include transitsearch, which coordinates amateur astronomers to look for extrasolar planets transiting their star – which then provide targets for the big academic boys to look more closely.

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