The Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey has been quietly surveying the cosmos, honing in on the universe with startling 520 megapixel resolution. While it's been on the hunt for dark matter and dark energy, the byproduct has been an amazing view of our neighboring stars and our universe's most distant galaxies.
Now, thanks to a browser viewer at Legacy Survey, you can comb through the visual data, and help the Legacy team identify new objects, strange quirks, and previously unknown galaxies from your browser. Run by Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, the web-viewable portion is just a small chunk of an enormous amount of data. For instance, the latest data release is 33 terabytes (33,000 gigabytes) just for image data, not to mention other huge databases that extract individual galaxy images, cross-reference with other sky surveys, store coordinate data, and store log files. You can download that data ... but you might need quite a few spare hard drives to actually store it.
The crowdsourcing part comes courtesy of Galaxy Zoo, an attempt to identify the galaxies in the image by relying on thousands upon thousands of users worldwide. So stare into the cosmos for a bit ... and see if something unexpected stares back at you.
Source: The Latest News