Citizen Science

A project that crowdsources real-time reports and photographs of the aurora from the public, improving where and when auroral displays are forecast — turning sky-watchers into a distributed sensor network for space weather.

The project that asked the public to sort galaxies by shape from survey images — and found volunteers could do it as well as experts, at enormous scale. Its classifications became a landmark dataset and the training labels for the machine-learning classifiers that followed.

A worldwide campaign to measure light pollution by having people compare the faintest stars they can see — often in Orion — against a set of star charts, and report what they see. The result is a global, year-on-year map of the brightening night sky.

A project inviting the public to search stellar light curves for the tiny dips of a transiting planet — finding candidates, including unusual ones, that automated pipelines had missed. A demonstration that human eyes still catch things algorithms overlook.

A project in which volunteers scanned microscope images of the aerogel flown on NASA's Stardust mission, hunting for the microscopic tracks of interstellar dust grains — a needle-in-a-haystack search that distributed human attention could solve.

The largest platform for people-powered research, where hundreds of thousands of volunteers help classify and analyse data across astronomy and many other sciences. It grew out of Galaxy Zoo and now hosts dozens of projects that turn human pattern-recognition into published results.