Skylog: Looking Up!

How many galaxies have two, three, or more arms? How tightly wound are the spiral arms? What shape is the bulge in a galaxy - if there is one? How many "irregular" galaxies are there? The primary goal of Galaxy Zoo 2 is to construct a database of detailed shape information for the largest sample of galaxies ever assembled.  But that takes lots of eyes looking at lots of galaxies.  So far, over 200,000 people have helped (including several AFM members).  Helping is easy.  

Go to the Galaxy Zoo website, and read the tutorial under "How to Take Part."  Then register and start classifying!  To try it out (but not have your work counted), you can Classify Galaxies as an unregistered guest by clicking here.

Stardust@Home
The Stardust spacecraft was launched to collect particles of interstellar dust from comet Wild 2 in January of 2004.  On January 15, 2006, the Stardust spacecraft's sample return capsule safely returned to earth, and contained these particles trapped in aerogel. This interstellar dust originated in distant stars, light-years away, and are the first such particles ever collected in space! But, scientists can only study the particles once they are found within the aerogel. This is not easy. For every thousand of particles of varying sizes collected from the comet, scientists estimate that only around 45 tiny (about a micron, or a millionth of a meter) interstellar dust particles were trapped. The aerogel collector is 1,000 square centimeters in size, and is interspersed with flaws, cracks, and an uneven surface.  Think of how the surface of old Jello looks. Scientists used an automated scanning microscope to collect images of the entire Stardust interstellar collector and created stacks of images called "focus movies."

 

All in all there are about a million such focus movies for people like us to look at, and try to spot these tiny particles using a special Virtual Microscope (VM) that works in a web browser. If you happen to discover a particle, you will appear as a co-author on any scientific paper by the Stardust@home collaboration announcing the discovery of the particle... and you will be able to name the particle!  Using the Virtual Microscope is easy; spotting particles isn't too difficult either.  You can look back at old movies you have flagged as containing a particle and see how many other volunteers also saw the same thing. There is a tutorial and a quiz, so you can be confident of your skills before you start.

Citizen Sky
Citizen scientists are volunteers, with or without any training, who work with trained researchers to answer real-world questions.  And, no equipment is needed for this project so you and I can easily be citizen scientists!  Over the next 3 years volunteers and experts will observe and analyze epsilon Aurigae... a bright, eclipsing binary variable star located in the constellation Auriga, the charioteer.  The problem:  Nobody knows why this star changes in brightness every 27 years, and is eclipsed for 2 years! What can eclipse it for that long? Scientists aren't certain so they are asking for our help. The next eclipse begins August 2009 and will last until May 2011.  The American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO) sponsored this 'citizen science' project to get as many observers as possible to watch and measure these changes while it eclipses. The star is too bright to make accurate measurements using a telescope; visual observation is better -- so truly anyone can help.  It's not difficult to do; you compare epsilon Aurigae to neighboring stars to estimate its brightness (is it "as bright as" a given star nearby with a known brightness? if so, that's the brightness you record). With thousands of people around the world making and reporting observations, the scientists can perform statistical analyses to try to determine what's causing the eclipses. Sound interesting? Read the 10 star Tutorial (the PDFon that page gives loads of information) and sign up like me!