For this assignment, you’ll learn about and participate in a "citizen science" project. There are a growing number of projects that use software to enable the public to help scientists analyze data in a variety of ways. Some of these are passive. For example, there are projects for which you download software that allows your computer’s free time to be used in data analysis. This is called "distributed computing" and basically uses volunteers’ computers as a supercomputer (one of those, if you’re interested, is SETI@Home (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.). Other citizen science projects are more active and involve volunteers identifying things in images. There are projects across a wide variety of fields, and I highly encourage you to check them out. The main repository of these projects is Zooniverse, and you can check out the variety of projects here: Zooniverse projects (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site..

Focus on one of them, which is called Galaxy Zoo. Click to access Galaxy Zoo (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.. Click "Learn More" or "About" to read about the project. Then, click "Classify" to begin participating. Before you begin answering questions, start a word processing document. You’ll be shown an image of a distant galaxy and asked some questions about it (the questions will vary based on your answers to previous questions). For each different galaxy image (you’ll do 10 of them for this assignment), right-click (Windows) or control-click (Mac) on the image, and choose the option to "Copy image" and then paste it into your document. For each question, click where it says "Need some help with this task?" to learn more about the possible answers. Do not worry if you can’t answer a question positively. Each image is looked at by multiple volunteers, so you won’t mess anything up if you’re unsure. In your document, enter your answers to the questions (in addition to clicking on the answers on the website). When the site has asked you all the questions for that particular image, the "Done" button will be activated. Click on that to move on to the next image.

Upload your document with 10 images and your associated answers.

If you want to explore more astronomy-related citizen science projects, check out the other Zooniverse Space (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site. projects.