Things that happen when you neglect your blog #187: You find a finished article that you forgot to publish and which is quite outdated now. You now have to bite the bullet and publish it anyway, because you are to cheap to ditch it.
“You” in that case is, of course, me. So here it comes:
It has already been all over the news and blogs, but I cannot resist to comment a little more on the newly opened Galaxy Zoo.
The site shows galaxy images from the SDSS to the public and lets them classify them. Categories are very simple: spirals (subdivided into direction of rotation and edge-on), ellipticals, mergers and stars/unknown. The aim is, of course, to use the human brains’ excellent capability to recognise pattern, even if they are feeble. What a wonderful project! I am quite sure it will become popular and therefore successful.
As a “professional”, however, one gets into troubles when trying this myself. That’s because of a little too much background knowledge. Mainly, I find it hard to ignore the color of a galaxy or some other details that are visible. This probably biases my judgment more towards the “other” classification as compared to the more specific ones.