Armchair Astronomy

When you've finished correcting Wikipedia and you've done your time in the virtual sweatshop of Amazon's Mechanical Turk, take a few minutes out of your day to do some deep-space astronomy by helping the good folks at Galaxy Zoo classify some galaxies.

There's millions of pictures of them, and humans are better than computers at classifying them. So if we all pitch in and do a few, we can get them all sorted. The site walks you through a five-minute tutorial showing you how to sort out the images, then you just click through them. Pretty easy, kinda dull, but then you realize that the chances are good that the picutre you're looking at is of an object in the universe probably never before seen by human eyes.

That's cool.