Almost two years ago we launched the Milky Way Project and the search for bubbles in our galaxy continues at http://www.milkywayprpject.org. Today we’re pleased to to welcome a new space-based Zooniverse project into the family. The Andromeda Project (http://www.andromedaproject.org) is science in the galaxy next-door and we thought that the MWP community might like this new project. It’s very much our new sister site. We’re betting that you can help us explore some amazing Hubble Space Telescope data, to help identifying star clusters in Andromeda.
There may be as many as 2,500 star clusters hiding in Hubble’s Andromeda images, but only 600 have been identified so far in months of searching, and star clusters tend to elude pattern-recognition software. We know it’s something that everyone can help with, even without extensive training. There are more than 10,000 images waiting at http://www.andromedaproject.org – they all come from the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury, or PHAT for short. The goal of the PHAT survey is to map about one-third of Andromeda’s star-forming disk, through six filters spread across the electromagnetic spectrum — two ultraviolet, two visible and two infrared.
The Hubble telescope started gathering images for the treasury in 2010 and is expected to send its last batch of images back to Earth in the summer of 2013. The Andromeda Project aims to produce the largest catalog of star clusters known in any spiral galaxy.
You can also find our the Andromeda Project on Twitter @andromedaproj and on Facebook too.
The Milky Way Project Blog 