News Revisited

This comet was predicted to be magnitude 17 but is now clearly visible with the naked eye at about magnitude 3 from the Northern Hemisphere, reports A Quantum Diaries Survivor and a thread at www.irishastronomy.org.  It’s the extra star between Mirphak and Capella and looks similar to a globular cluster in a large telescope.

As you can see my posting rate has dramatically slowed lately.  Currently reading the news isn’t as high a priority for me given the various other things that are going on in my life.  I will still post an occasional story here when I see something of note but for now I’m not expecting to post much.  I do expect that at some point things will settle down again and I’ll start reading the news on a more frequent basis.  Thank you for reading.

The GalaxyZoo project has announced its first preliminary results.  As I mentioned before the GalaxyZoo project asks the general public to classify images of galaxies.  The results they are announcing now is that galaxies tend to rotate counter-clockwise from our point of view.  If that were to hold true there would need to be a unknown force acting upon them or the universe would need to be lopsided in some way.  Naturally I have to wonder if there is a natural bias in the human eye/brain system that explains away this anomaly.  Of course, they have already considered this and are investigating it by adding a bunch of mirror images into the database to see how they are categorized.  This is quite an interesting project.

Another thing I find interesting is that when they compared their data to that of earlier work done professional astronomers they found that the self-selected general public is about as good at classifying galaxies.