Cumbrian Sky

The internet can be used for good or evil, we all know that. Depending on which blue highlighted link you choose to click on you can use it to feed your fascination with space exploration, conservation, entertainment or child pornography. It’s a meeting place for scientists, film buffs, lovesick teenagers and child abusers alike. If you have an addictive personality, it can be especially hypnotising; there are now almost as many virtual bingo halls, poker tables and slot machines as there are shrines to Britney Spears or “I hate Paris Hilton!” blogs.

Until last week I thought I’d survived all these temptations and distractions pretty well, using my link to the World Wide Web to drool over the latest images from Mars and Saturn, keep up to date with the latest developments in astronomy and run my local astronomical society. But finally, after almost a decade of surfing, I have fallen. I have, my friends, been corrupted, utterly and absolutely. My soul now belongs to the most evil, most addictive, most soul-sucking website ever created, and its wicked, merciless designers.

I’m now trapped, without hope of escape or rescue, inside the Galaxy Zoo.

If you haven’t heard about “The Zoo” by now, then either this is your very first time online – in which case, abandon all hope now, your life is over my friend! – or you’ve been living under a rock at the bottom of the ocean for the past week, because it is the New Big Thing on the web. On the surface it is a serious scientific project. The basic idea is to enlist the help of internet users to assist in the cataloguing of over a million galaxies, imaged during a recent massive “sky survey”. That “help” comes in the form of signing up to the website and, after a short tutorial, looking at a picture of a galaxy imaged during the survey, and using your skill and judgement to decide if it’s a spiral galaxy, a lens-shaped elliptical galaxy, or something else. You click on an icon which tells the website what kind of galaxy you think your target is and voila, with a click of a mouse you’vecrossed one galaxy off the looooong “what is it?” list and literally contributed to science. Then you look at another picture, classify it with another click, and… well, you get the idea.

This is something that could be done automatically, of course; there are pattern recognition programs that do “this kind of thing”, but apparently the human brain is much better at recognising patterns than even the best program, so this is a project for wetware rather than software. And as ambitious as Galaxy Zoo’s aims are they’re not over-ambitious, because this kind of “image hunt” has been tried before, with great success. Last year NASA launched the STARDUST@home site which invited net users to scan images and look for tiny particles of comet dust trapped within gel during the Stardust probe’s fly-by of a comet. Again, anyone spotting one of the elusive comet grains was contributing directly to science.

But Galaxy Zoo is… different. You’re not looking for tiny specks of grit, in fact you’re not looking for anything. You’re looking at something, trying to decide what it is, and that something is a galaxy, an enormous city of stars shining against the black of space. Some are big, some are small. Some are dramatically curled spirals with sweeping arms and glowing centres, some are vague, shapeless, misty blurs. Some make you sit back from your screen and, for a moment, think “Wow… look at that…” while others make you just automatically click your mouse to move on to the next one…

And that’s where the addiction comes in, and why there are now probably tens if not hundreds of thousands of “Galaxy Zoo widows” and “widowers” scattered around the planet. Pale-skinned through lack of exposure to sunlight, bleary-eyed through lack of sleep, their spines hunched and bent from long hours of sitting in front of their PCs and their wrists crippled with RSI, these poor individuals have been trapped in The Zoo and now can’t get out.

Why? Why is it so addictive? It’s simple really: in the split second before you call up an image on Galaxy Zoo you have no idea what you’re going to see, literally No Idea. You might be faced with a small dot that looks like an out of focus star. You might see a yellowish smear that looks suspiciously like a close-up image of a stepped on cockroach. You might see a lone elliptical galaxy like this...

...or you might see… something wonderful... a trio or quartet of galaxies clustered together… or a “Ring galaxy”… or two galaxies merging together or passing through each other, trailing out tendrils of stars behind them like candyfloss pulled from a stick…

… or a single spiral galaxy like this...

...a majestic blue and white Catherine wheel of whirled stars, with a shining golden heart and spiral arms dotted and blotted with crimson blooms of new starbirth –   and you might literally be the first person on Earth ever to see it.

And if you don’t see that? Well, you hear a voice whispering in your ear from the “Galaxy Zoo imp”, an evil little creature that somehow downloads itself into your computer and then travels up through your fingers and into your head when you sign up. “Naaah, not much to look at… but just click that mouse,” the imp tells you, “ and the next one will be better, you’ll see…” So you click, and okay, the next one is a little better. “See? But the next one will be beautiful…!” the imp tells you, so you click… and click… and even if your screen fills suddenly with an image worthy of Hubble itself, shows you a galaxy of such beauty it could have been painted by Leonardo daVinci, the imp tells you the next one will be Even Better, and you believe it…

And before you know it you’ve been online for an hour, maybe three, it’s dark outside, you’ve missed the latest episode of DR WHO or HEROES you’ve looked forward to watching all day, and you realise in a classic “Noooooooooooooo!” moment that you’re the one behind the bars of the Galaxy Zoo, trapped like the tortured spirit of the lighthouse keeper or fairground owner in an episode of Scooby Doo.

There are many levels to Galaxy Zoo, and by that I mean you get out of it what you put in. You can see it as “just a bit of fun”, a way of killing some free time inbetween other computer tasks or while waiting for that pan of pasta to boil. Or you can be all noble and self-righteous about it and pat yourself on the back for “Contributing to science” whilst clicking away. Or you can think of yourself as an armchair galactic explorer, flying around the universe taking in sights you might not otherwise get to see. In fact, you’ll probably go through all those stages in the first few days. But there’s another level to the Zoo, a special level only accessed through a secret trapdoor of the imagination and reserved for those with a romantic soul and a true love of the universe…

To access this level you have to appreciate what the galaxies on your screen actually are. You have to have a sense of scale, Know What You’re Looking At. You have to grasp that each “galaxy” is actually an enormous cloud of stars, hundreds of thousands of millions of them in some cases. You have to grasp that they’re moving through space in groups, like families of whales through the great ocean of space. You have to sense how many of them there are “out there”, a galaxy for every snowflake that falls in a blizzard, a galaxy for every one of the two hundred thousand million stars in our own galaxy, the Milky Way. You have to be able to look at the galaxy on your screen and even if it’s not a thing of beauty appreciate it as being special, something grand, something magnificent, because each and every lacklustre, uninspiring, pale damp squib of a spiral or squashed bug of an elliptical is, in all likelyhood, someone else’s Milky Way, their home in space.

To be honest it’s easier to do this, to think this way, when you’re faced with a Grand Design spiral, just because they’re so slap-across-the-face stunning. I remember the first time I saw one of these beauties appear on my screen, after several dozen yawn-inducing ellipticals that could have been classified with a “Nothing special… boring…” icon. Suddenly, there in front of me was a cathedral of light, a graceful sculpture of starlight and shining gas that had to be, just had to be home to countless civilisations. I could feel themliving within its cream-stirred-into-coffee spiral arms, hear their heroic legends and tales, see their Mona Lisas and Davids, hear their Beethovens and Mozarts, imagine their golden starships travelling between their stars,sense them looking back at me –

And that’s when it hit me, why every galaxy in the Zoo, no matter how boring it appears or how small it is, needs to be treated with respect, why it deserves to be looked at for more than a split second. Somewhere, Out There, chances are there’s an extraterrestrial sitting at their screen, playing about on – sorry, working hard on – their own world’s version of Galaxy Zoo, looking at one galaxy after another. At some point, maybe as you’re reading these very words dear reader, she’ll see our own spiral Milky Way pop upon her screen and she’ll either think “Hmm, nothing special” and move on, or take a moment to look at it properly, appreciate it, before leaving it behind.

As I say in my poem, “Galaxy Zoo”, every galaxy is a lantern shining in the darkness of the universe. We should treat others’ homes with the same respect we would expect them to show ours.

There are many ways to kill time on the internet, and how you fill your coffee break at work, or the gap between adverts at home is up to you. But if you want to try something new, something totally different, that will not only contribute to science but show you wonders beyond your imagination, and maybe even open your eyes and your heart to the true beauty of the universe, then the Galaxy Zoo’s doors are open to you and the Zoo keepers would love to welcome you inside. Why not just poke your head through the Zoo gates and take a look around?

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• #1 Comment from memes121 
  7/15/07 1:37 PM | Permalink

  I gave myself a headache staring so hard. Off again! Tammy