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SkyandTelescope.com March 2014 23

ies in our solar system. These immense datasets will bring

new challenges, and citizen science will have to evolve.

It took nearly 14 months for volunteers in the second

incarnation of Galaxy Zoo to classify 304,122 galaxies

from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. LSST will provide

snapshots of billions of new galaxies. That will be far too

much data for online citizen science in its current form

to take on, even if everyone in the world playing Angry

Birds spent that time on Galaxy Zoo instead. The solution

is to join forces with the machines. The bulk and routine

tasks will be given to the computer classifi ers, which will

likely be trained by human-based classifi cations. Citizen

scientists will be given the more diffi cult tasks and likely

enlisted to review a subset of the images the computers

classify to teach and improve the automated algorithms.

In the meantime, while we wait for the arrival of LSST

and the SKA, whether it’s identifying craters on the Moon

(moonzoo.org), fi nding undiscovered gravitational lenses

(spacewarps.org), or mapping seasonal features on the

surface of Mars (planetfour.org), why not help astrono-

mers explore our wondrous universe? It’s only a click

away at the Zooniverse. ✦

Former Yale University astronomer and planetary scientist

Meg Schwamb is now at the Institute of Astronomy and

Astrophysics at Academia Sinica in Taiwan. As a member of

the science team for Planet Hunters and Planet Four, she uses

citizen-science results to explore how planets form and evolve.

A WARPED PERSPECTIVE Visitors to spacewarps.org can help

discover distant galaxies (such as these) that have been gravita-

tionally lensed by foreground clusters of galaxies. This enables

scientists to probe the distribution of visible and dark matter in

the foreground clusters.

SPACEWARPS.ORG / CFHT LEGACY SURVEY

To learn more about the Mars and

Space Warps citizen science projects,

visit skypub.com/citizenscience.

T

SS

v

TWO-PLANET SYSTEM Using observations from Kepler and NASA’s

Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers have discovered two planets orbiting

the star Kepler-10. Planet Hunters volunteers can fi nd more systems like this.

NASA/AMES / JPL-CALTECH

Planet Hunters2.indd 23 12/24/13 11:45 AM