Galaxy Shapes and Sizes

Here at TheSpacewriter’s Keep we’re all down with the obligatory January cold. Sitting in front of the computer whining about it seems to be the job of the day. But that gets old, especially as the week wears on, so when I’m not trying to get some work done, I’ve been surfing around the Web looking for cool pix. Here’s something that caught my eye from last year’s HST images — the Coma Cluster of galaxies. Look at it closely to see how many galaxy shapes you can find.

This reminds me of a very cool project that you can participate in if you’re so inclined. It’s called Galaxy Zoo and it allows interested folk to help astronomers classify galaxies by their shapes.  Anybody can do it… and many, many regular folks as well as astronomers and their students have signed up to gaze at galaxies and put in their votes for shapes.  I know I’ve written about this before, but since that time they’ve begun beta-testing GalaxyZoo 2, a followup study from the first one. You can still do the original Galaxy Zoo, so get on over there and check it out!