Scientists are looking for your help in classifying galaxies.  Galaxyzoo.org has been set up in an attempt to classify about one million galaxies and it is going to rely on volunteers to do so.  There aren’t any automated systems that can accurately classify these galaxies so it would take researchers years to manually scan through the photographs and tag them.  The thought is that if they can get 10,000 to 20,000 volunteers the project could be completed in as little as a month.

They are asking people to sit down and take a glance at a bunch of photos classifying the galaxies in those photos as spiral or elliptical and clockwise or counter-clockwise for the spirals.  There is a tutorial that explains the difference with examples and tips.  Naturally, they ask you to contact them if you see something unusual that does not look like the photos in the tutorial.

One advantage for the volunteers is that many of the photographs they will be looking at have never been seen by humans before.

I have tried out the site and classified a slew of galaxies.  It is fairly easy.  The two things I missed at first is that the “Star” button is also used when you don’t know what type it is and that the “Show Grid Overlay” checkbox provides a way to identify for sure which object in the image is the galaxy in question.  Currently the site has a few quirks but it is easy to use and none of the quirks will get in your way.

The first thing you should do is go through the tutorial.  It is helpful even if you really think you know what you are doing.  After that you will be required to go through a “trial.”  This trial consists of 15 images with known galaxy/star types.  You need to get at least 8 correct (seems low to me) before they will allow you to classify the unknown images.