October 12, 2011

Planet Hunting with an iPhone

Previously mentioned, one of the citizen science projects from Zooniverse online decoding an ancient papyri, is designed to engage the public in discovery and research. Another, in the trend of crowd-sourced computing initiatives, is the Planet Hunters project. Recently, Zooniverse published information regarding two exoplanets discovered with their system, using data acquired from the Kepler telescope. The Kepler team announced the citizen discovery paper, marking the time and phase of each transit. MysteryPile did not discover either of the transits, but will keep trying! We have classified 360 galaxies since August using an iPhone app called Galaxy Zoo. The app is great to keep busy with on road trips and it's awesome to know our contributions are helping a greater cause. If you're not sure where to begin classifying star data with Galaxy Zoo.