VeeshanVault

No real idea what the point is... but if you're feeling kind of bored and philanthropic at the same time, you could check out http://www.galaxyzoo.org/Press.aspx and perhaps classify some galaxies in your spare time.

BTW, who knew astronomers were so hot... from reverse 3/4 angle at least.

I picked that site up off of Bad Astronomy Blog and have spent way too much time the last week identifying galaxies. It's a cool way to kill some time.

Basically there are millions of images of galaxies that have not been classified as spiral, merging, etc. etc. so they give you a quickie test on how to ID these galaxies, then a test to see if you've learned anything. Once you pass the test they give you random images of galaxies and ask you to ID them as best you can. I would imagine if they show the same image to 50 people, and 40 ID it as a clockwise spiral then they pretty much throw that into the clockwise spiral group.

There are some pretty cool images and every once in a while you'll get merging galaxies. I've seen 2 merging images out of the probably 400 or so that I've viewed and classified.

It's a fun way to waste some time. IIRC most of these are hubble images that haven't been reviewed yet.