You've never been to the moon But don't you want to go

by Doctor Science

Greetings, fellow Citizens of the Republic of Science!

Galaxy Zoo began more than 3 years ago. It's a crowdsource project to have regular people -- citizen scientists, as they say -- do image-processing for large-scale projects. I worked with them for a while -- especially on what are now called pea galaxies -- then dropped back as I did more political work and blogging.

Now I'm going through one of my periodic realizations that I'm wasting a lot of time doing mindless games (sudoku, fer chrise sake), and thinking maybe I could use those brain cycles -- FOR SCIENCE!

At this point, Galaxy Zoo has expanded to a zooniverse of projects, some by the original team and some using the Galaxy Zoo API. This is what I think of the current projects:

• At Galaxy Zoo itself you can help classify galaxy images from the Hubble Space Telescope. I found the tutorial video a bit confusing, but the actual classification is easy and fairly mindless. There are pretty colors, and you typically get to look at things like a spiral galaxy 2.5 billion light years away:
  
  • Galaxy Zoo: Supernova is nearly up-to-the-minute science, sorting through possible supernovae within hours of detection so that the astronomers can get a jump on them: nothing is more valuable than data from a supernova that hasn't yet reached its peak brightness. It's easy enough and quite scientifically useful, but I find it too boring to really do much.
  • Galaxy Zoo: Mergers is about computer simulations to model galaxy collisions. There are two things you can do: rate simulation results for their similarity to a given real-world target, and grow your own. My appreciation for how *hard* it is to come up with a reasonable similuations grows. However, I don't find this interesting enough to be really relaxing, if you know what I mean.
    
• Moon Zoo is my current favorite. There are two things to do: Boulder Wars, which is basically a bubble-sort for "boulder" (=loose surface debris) density; and Crater Survey, where you mark craters above a certain size, and also stick notes on other features of interest.

  Obviously, this is not the right choice if you're looking for *colors*, but otherwise it's quite seriously fascinating. All the images you've looked at recently can be seen in "My Moon Zoo", on a map so you can see where you've been working:

  
  
  The images you work on aren't scattered randomly, they tend to focus on areas that have some particular scientific interest. Many of the ones I've worked on are near Aristarchus:

  

  which turns out to be a geologically (selenologically?) unusual and significant region, with a lot of peculiar topography. But even without that, I love knowing I'm looking at another *planet*, getting to know it in such detail.

  Maybe you-all can help me with one thing. Sometimes when I look at an image of craters my eyes say "yep, those are indented". Other times, depending on the angle of the light, my eyes tell me "those are outdented bumps":
  
  
  Turning my head sideways doesn't seem to help. Is there any way to re-boot my visual system, so I see craters as craters?

• We've all encountered plenty of references to ships' logbooks in fiction and history -- they've been kept as standard, daily records for hundreds of years. The UK Royal Navy, notably, has thousands upon thousands of old logbooks in its archives, very few of which have been examined since they were deposited. Old Weather is a project to transcribe hand-written logbook entries from Royal Navy vessels of the WWI period, building a database of historic weather data from all over the world's oceans. You "sign on" to a ship as a cadet, and work your way up the chain of command as you transcribe entries (and learn to read particular people's handwriting). For me, this is not as relaxing as some of the astronomical projects, not least because it engages my imagination: what were they seeing? how did they feel? It's very *human*, shadowing someone from a century ago -- while gathering data for climate models that may predict weather a century from now.
• I've looked at Solar Storm Watch, but haven't been able to develop a search image to use on the video data. This is another real-time project, trying to spot solar storms as early as possible, but I find the tutorial opaque. Maybe you can do better than me.

Comments

[Gary Farber]

Fantastic resources.

[Countme?]

All very cool.

Thank you.

[Matt McIrvin]

Arrange the lighting near your monitor so that the light source is coming from approximately the same direction as the sun in the image. That may help.

[liberal japonicus]

I'm disappointed that they don't have Google Street View for the moon. I guess it is because there are no wireless signals to poach...

[Hogan]

OMG I am totally signing up for Old Weather.

[Catsy]

Pick a large reference crater. One that's so big that you can't mistake it for anything else, like the one in the upper right of that image. Take note of on which side of the circle the crescent of its shadow falls.

Any concave depression will have the shadow on the same side. Convex bumps will have the shadow on the opposite side.

Also, most craters will have a very slight halo of lighter material around them from where the light falls evenly on the lip of the crater.

[Gary Farber]

Linked in between boxes here, by the bye. Spiffy stuff, Dr. Science!

Incidentally, a while ago I wrote a a comment on one of your first posts, if not your first, post, which resulted in me only belatedly realizing, days later, that it could have been perfectly reasonably interpreted as my implying I thought it was a bad idea for you to post on sf topics; on the chance that you read my sloppy and hasty comment that way, let me assure you that that wasn't in any way what I meant!

I was just, at the time, startled to learn how much of an sf fan you are, and that you had such a fannish history!

So, anyway, I Just Wish To Say clearly that if you do feel like covering any sf topics, I, for one, would be highly interested.

This applies to everything else you think might be interesting, as well. :-)

[Doctor Science]

No worries, Gary! I have something in the works, in fact, which I hope to finish up in between pollworking tomorrow.

I hope one of my fellow bloggers here can get into my posts tomorrow morning and scrape out the spam, because I'll be basically out of the loop -- my shift is from 5:15 am to about 8:30pm.

[Gary Farber]

Only Eric or Slart have the SuperUser password to do that. Or maybe Sebastian does, as well.

I'd be happy to help stamp out spam anywhere and everywhere I could. Of course, since Eric's normal password allows me access to his posts at Newshoggers and Democracy Arsenal, I could always go clean out spam there, if I have spare spam-cleaning time.

:-)

As it is, I've been doing plenty of late night and early morning clean up on old threads of Eric's and mine, but that's all I have access to.

Meanwhile, as I wrote a bit ago in Russell's last open thread, I'm not going to have time to post in the next month, save by chance, or in very short and fleeting fashion, at best, so, sorry about that.

So, I can't help but be curious, did you give up on Smallville eventually, or still watch?

I'm still faithfully watching, but can think of many reasons you might have quit caring.

[Emma]

There are humanities projects like this too. The National Library of Australia has a newspaper digitisation project where anyone can help correct the OCR of all the newspapers that have been done. This makes Australia's historic newspapers searchable -- a huge resource for historians that I use all the time in my work. Plus you get to read cool old newspapers.

[Gary K]

I find that, in fact, turning my head _does_ help, at least in this instance. Try turning it both ways, until the image seems to invert in your perception. Then try coming slowly back to level, staring at the photo all the while. As a last resort, copy the photo to a program in which you can rotate it 180°.

It's fascinating how stable the illusion is. If I initially see the craters as bumps then no amount of trying dissipates that perception.