The Milky Way Project Talk

How do we know if we are doing a good job?

  • amieres by amieres

    Is there any form of feedback?
    Sometimes I'm unsure if a feature should be marked or not.
    It would be good to have some kind of review or test samples to see how I fare with different categories.
    To bubbles seem the easiest ones.
    I'm not sure about GEDs or galaxies.
    To me everything seems like star cluster.

    Posted

  • jules by jules moderator

    There's no feedback of that kind on the Milky Way project and thinking about it - it would be tricky to do as the science team are looking to us to identify features and for this project no "calibration" images are used. If enough of us think something is a galaxy or an EGO - then it likely is one. The Guide is quite helpful to get started but if I get stuck I find searching on a topic is really useful - especially searching collections. That way you get to see how other people have classified objects and you begin to see patterns emerging.

    As for star clusters - they tend to be quite tight groups of stars in these images. Here's my collection, If you see a loose group of stars which you think are related, however, go ahead and mark it as a cluster. If enough people do the same, then it's likely a cluster. 😃

    Just a question - what is a GED?

    Posted

  • DZM by DZM admin

    Hi @amieres , welcome to Milky Way Project!

    I will say this: you're probably doing a better job than you think! In general, we've found that people are much better at recognizing patterns and features than they think they are. And that accuracy increases exponentially when you reduce data from a couple dozen classifiers.

    Definitely check out the guide, collections, ask questions on Talk, etc., but don't agonize too much over things that aren't perfectly clear. Citizen science supports educated guessing! 😃 Thanks for being part of the project!

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  • jules by jules moderator in response to DZM's comment.

    "Citizen science supports educated guessing! "

    I like that! I like that a lot! 😄

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  • DZM by DZM admin in response to jules's comment.

    Thank you! I post it a lot on different Talk threads. It helps people understand that the whole point with our projects is to collect the best guesses of laymen, because those best guesses, boiled down, almost always produce the same answer that a trained scientist would give. 😃

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