Hands on Astronomy

I came across a quick little article about how us amateur astronomers can put in our "two cents" in a new web-based project called Galaxy Zoo. The cool thing is that this project wants to enlist the general public's assistance to help the Sloan Digital Sky Survey classify a million galaxies. This endeavor will help scientists better understand how the cosmos evolved by asking participants to distinguish the subtle differences, for example, between spiral and elliptical galaxies. Apparently the human brain is more adept at figuring out these variations than a computer program. After folks do a short online tutorial, Galaxy Zoo will show galaxy images to participants in the hopes that we could spot any minute differences between galaxies, and maybe even to decide which way a particular galaxy is rotating! Exciting stuff to be involved with I say.