IceHunters could use your help

[Aristos Queue]

If you've got some down time, there's a science project that needs community help. It's called IceHunters... I helped with the beta of this site, and it is ready for prime time now.

http://www.icehunters.org/hunt.php

IceHunters is part of the Galaxy Zoo project, taking massive quantities of astronomy data and crowd sourcing it to find interesting tidbits. This particular branch of the zoo is looking for Kupier Belt Objects (aka KBOs), which orbit out around Neptune and Pluto, trying to find one that can be the target for the New Horizons space craft in 2015. A side-effect of this survey is finding asteroids and variable stars.

Basically, you create an account and start looking at images, and then you circle the white blobs. Not the black blobs. Not the white blobs with black centers. Just the white blobs. And if you think that sounds like an easy task, wait until you see the noise in the images. See, they're not real images. They're composites designed to highlight the KBOs. But there's lots of room for interpretation, which is why this has to be a human instead of computer task. Every image gets seen by at minimum 15 people, so don't worry if you get it wrong... that's the beauty of crowd sourcing... collectively, we tend to get it right. Here's the tutorial for all the juicy details.

If you get bored with IceHunters, there are many other branches to the Galaxy Zoo, including supernova hunting and galaxy classification. Vaguely mechanical, almost zen-like, it can be a calming way to pass the time, and it helps science figure out what our solar system is made of.