Do Some Astronomy

When I added this task, I anticipated it would involve stumbling around a field in the middle of the night, staring through a telescope with some bearded men in duffel coats. Which sounds cold and unfashionable. As it turns out, I've since discovered, thanks to Alice Sheppard, the delights of Zooniverse, in which web users are asked to help sort through astronomical data from the comfort of their computer. No running around at night. No beards. No duffel coats. At the moment I've been playing around on the Galaxy Zoo pages, in which you're shown images of galaxies from the Hubble space telescope. You're then asked whether the galaxy is rounded or is a disk, if there's any spirals, if there's anything else in the photo, and so on. I'm finding it strangely addictive. For more data-crunching for the benefit of astronomy, there's Planet Hunters, looking for "transit features" that might suggest a planet around a star. Or you can help map craters with Moon Zoo. This is science, my friends! Science!