More than 85,000 Internet users have signed up to become galaxy
inspectors as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey's "Galaxy
Zoo" project - and you can, too. Inspectors go through a
tutorial and click their way through an initial database of 1
million galaxies, classifying them by type. Since the project
was launched, less than a month ago, each galaxy in the current
database has been checked multiple times (for a total of 12
million checks), but the organizers say there's much more work
that this astronomical army can do. For nine years, hundreds
researchers from around the world have been using the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey's telescope in New Mexico to create a three-
dimensional map spanning a quarter of the sky. "We're a roadmap
or an atlas of the universe," Sloan spokesman Gary Ruderman
explained. |Oxford astronomer Caroline Zunckel uses the Galaxy
Zoo Web site to classify a spiral galaxy. The idea behind the
Galaxy Zoo is to corral the sky survey's massive files of
observations into categories using the w