Today we have launched The Milky Way Project. The Milky Way Project aims to sort and measure our galaxy. Initially we’re asking you to help us find and draw bubbles in beautiful infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope. Understanding the cold, dusty material that we see in these images helps scientists to learn how stars form and how our galaxy changes and evolves with time.
As well as drawing out bubbles in our galaxy, we’re also asking you to mark other objects such as star clusters, galaxies and ghostly red ‘fuzzy’ objects. We’re asking you to help us map star formation in our galaxy! Take a look at our tutorial page for the complete run down, with examples.
Also launching today is the Zooniverse’s new collaboration and community tool: Talk. Milky Way Talk resides at http://talk.milkywayproject.org and there you can find, collect and comment on the objects you see in the Milky Way Project. Every time you classify an image in the Milky Way Project you will be prompted to ‘discuss’ that image via Talk. Talk lets you collect objects together and shares those collections with everybody else. Talk is a brand new feature, developed in-house at Zooniverse HQ. It continues to evolve and change as you use it and we hope that through the Milky Way Project, we can make Talk even better.
Don’t forget, you can find us on twitter @milkywayproj and we hope to see you soon on Milky Way Talk!
The Milky Way Project Blog 
I joined about an hour and a half ago. The only thing I find getting use to is how the talk section is not like the rest of the Zoo forum. There aren’t any topics really and there aren’t a lot of people. But overall it is very fun. Is this forum going to be added to the Galaxy Zoo forum eventually?
No, the forum for the Milky Way Project is the Talk site. Talk is brand new and will evolve and improve with time. It lets you do a lot that the old forum would not. It’ll just take a short time to get it running smoothly.
I AM ADDICTED ALREADY! 😀 themilkywayproject RULES!!
Loved the Galzoo 1 & 2, lovin the milkyzoo too. Its great to be doin our neighbourhood as it allows relative newbys to astronomy (like myself) to contribute in some small way to the great work that Dr chris & the gang are doing. Keep it up. ps will there ever be a galaxy nebula?