Fancy writing a 'Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxies'?

Galaxy Zoo 2 needs armchair astronomers

By Lester Haines • Get more from this author

Posted in Space, 17th February 2009 12:16 GMT

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Armchairs astronomers are being invited to contribute to an online "Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxies" - an in-depth examination of 250,000 galaxies in search of "the strange and unusual".

That's the aim of the Galaxy Zoo 2 project, a follow-up to Galaxy Zoo which saw over 150,000 people worldwide submit 80m basic galactic classifications using images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

Oxford University's Dr Chris Lintott, one of the founders of Galaxy Zoo, explained: "The first Galaxy Zoo provided us with a Rough Guide to the sky and now we want our users to fill in all the details and create a real Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxies."

The Galaxy Zoo 2 press release elaborates: "As with the original site people are free to look at and describe as many galaxies as they like - even five minutes’ work will provide a valuable contribution. Galaxy Zoo 2 is intended to be even more fun as galaxies are pitted against each other in ‘Galaxy Wars’ (which one is more spirally?) and users can compete against their friends to describe more objects as well as record their best finds."

If you fancy a bit of light galaxy-sniffing, you can get involved here. ®

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