Now this is a really worthwhile 'time killer' if you have a good eye, an interest in astronomy and a spare few minutes every now and again.
Astronomers are inviting members of the public to help them make major new discoveries by taking part in a census of one million galaxies.
Using a simple but nicely designed website the volunteer is presented with one of a million images stored on a computer waiting to be seen for the first time. The image is then classified according to some basic properties at just the click of a single button.
I heard about this on the radio this morning and signed up straight away.... unfortunately I believe many others did too as the site is currently timing out when trying to serve up images for analysis. Still, I went through the tutorial and passed the simple trial run (correctly classify a minimum of 8 out of 15 images) and will just have to wait a little longer to try it out for real. This always seems to happen with interesting websites that are announced in this way... I seem to remember the same thing happening when the 1901 (?) Census data was first made available.
The BBC story covering this can be found here.
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