Monday, May 18, 2020

Penguins and the Shape of the Galaxies

Greetings all!

If you are really bored at home and/or worried out of your mind, here are two interesting citizen-science projects that will contribute to science research and will pause your worrying about everything that is happening in the world right now.

1) Penguin Detective: You can help scientists better understand and protect penguins by looking at the photographs taken near birds’ colonies and identifying the birds OR by looking for guano on satellite data. If you did not know, guano is penguin poop and is an important scientific tool! Apparently, scientists can estimate the number of birds in a colony by the area covered in guano.  

Image from

2) Galaxy Discover: If for some reason you do not want to look at penguin poop, then you might be interested in Galaxy Zoo! This project involves guessing the shape of a galaxy by looking at the images from observatory programs. Astronomers use the shape of a galaxy to learn about its history. And we humans are quite good at pointing out “Hey, that’s a weird shape” (in fact, we might be better at that than computers). So take a look and who knows you might discover something new and exciting in the sky!

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/Harvard-Smithsonian CfAhttps://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/spitzer/multimedia/spitzer-20070604.html

SOURCE:
You can find links to these projects and additional details here: https://www.space.com/penguins-search-galaxy-zoo-citizen-science-during-coronavirus.html

Stay safe and healthy!  

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