to read the instructions, please check the attachment

Galaxy Zoo is a crowdsourced astronomy project which invites people to assist in the morphological classification of large numbers of galaxies. It is perhaps so far the most successful project in citizen science, which asks the public to help in scientific research.

Started in 2007, the first project of Galaxy Zoo received, in 175 days, more than 40 million classifications from 100,000 volunteers for about 1 million celestial objects in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. After 10 years, Galaxy Zoo developed many projects to classify galaxies from observations with ground-based telescopes, space-based telescopes, and even numerical simulations.

In this lab, you are asked to join Galaxy Zoo to help classify 30 random galaxies, and answer some questions related to them. Please follow these steps:

1.Go to the website: https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/zookeeper/ galaxy-zoo (Galaxy Zoo is now a part of the “zooniverse”).

2.Register yourself and log in (it should be easy) — this is very important — otherwise, your records cannot be saved!

3.Now, back to the project website, scroll down, you will see “Get Started” with two options “Classic” and “Enhanced”. Let’s click on “Classic”.

4.Basically, you are ready to go! But, you may need some helps. You can click on “Tutorial” to learn more. What’s more useful is a link in the bottom of the right panel: “Need some help with this task?” I strongly suggest you read it before finishing EACH TASK: one galaxy has a few tasks, each of them having different help clues.

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5.Try to classify 8 objects. Then click the “RECENT” button in the top right of the webpage. You should be able to see the objects you just finished. 




Very Important: please keep in mind that when clicking on those options, you are helping human beings to advance our understanding of the universe! It’s not just for finishing a lab! So please be careful and responsible — each click counts!

6. Under each image, there are two buttons: “favorite” and “collect”. Click on the “collect” button, create your own collection (private is ok), and add each object/image into your collection.

7. Take a screenshot of the “RECENT” webpage with the images of the 8 objects.

8. Repeat Step 5 and 7 for three more times and finish 30 objects. Now you should have 4 screenshots, each with 7-8 objects.

9.Print out the 4 screenshots and turn them in with your report. A black+white printing is ok — no need for using color. Each galaxy is 0.5 point, so the total is 15 points. (Don’t try to copy from your friends, because galaxies are randomly appeared!)

10.Now, answer the following questions and submit your answers in a TYPED report. You can write an ID for each galaxy in your screenshots, then refer to the IDs when answering questions.