The Galaxy Needs You!

No, this is not another post about how you'll be able to lick Darth Vader's behind thanks to the US Postal Service. No, fair reader (-- or soulless abyss that is the Internet, drain on my soul and free time), the Galaxy really does need you, for SCIENCE!

As it turns out the work of painstakingly classifying the galaxies of the infinite blackness of Space is just too tedious for the big brains of the professional scientific community. They'd much rather be weighing black holes. So these Poindexters and Poindextresses have enlisted the greatest tool mankind has ever known for the purpose of classifying mountains and mountains of otherwise undecipherable, unsurmountable and nearly infinite data: Web 2.0.

New Mexican (?) astronomers (who of course have their degree in astrophysics, not the by-mail Miss Cleo service) have put together Galaxy Zoo and are enlisting volunteers to sift through the wormholes, star systems and nebulas and tell them what's what. The monstrous 'tag cloud' that ensues will hopefully give them more information on how the universe is shaped, in turn how the universe was formed, and what Exit to get off to find God's House.

Or, volunteers will be massively distracted once they discover a constellation that kinda looks like David Hasselhoff eating a hamburger off the floor...

UPDATE: There's a facebook group.