Welcome to the Andromeda Project!
We’re very excited you’ve taken the time to visit the new Andromeda Project site! With your help, we’re going to identify the largest sample of star clusters known in any spiral galaxy, including our own Milky Way. We will use the clusters you find to study the history of Andromeda and to better understand how stars form.
The beautiful images you will be looking at come from the Hubble Space Telescope. Since 2010, Hubble has spent nearly two months of time looking at Andromeda as part of the Panchromatic Hubble Andromeda Treasury (PHAT) survey. For the Andromeda Project, we’ve broken these pictures up into more than 9,000 separate images; there are more than 3 billion pixels that we need you to help us examine!
Star clusters are groups of hundreds to millions of stars that are all born together. This means that their ages are (relatively) easy to determine, and the first thing we do after you find the clusters will be to measure their ages and masses. Once their ages and masses are known, we can use these clusters to mark major formation epochs in the galaxies’ history. We will also identify the youngest star clusters which we can use to test theories of star formation.
In addition to star clusters, you’ll also be identifying background galaxies and image artifacts. We will use the galaxies to study the gas and dust within Andromeda; Galaxy Zoo veteran Bill Keel will have a blog post about this soon.
We’d like to thank our wonderful beta testers who helped make this site more usable. If you have any questions or comments take a look at the About and Guide sections, or create a post in the Talk section.
Good luck cluster hunters!
Anil
Anil Seth is an assistant professor at the University of Utah’s Physics & Astronomy department (http://www.physics.utah.edu/~aseth/)
The Andromeda Project 
link to PHAT is broken
Seems to be working now.
Yes, someone (Anil Seth, I think) fixed it, later in the day I posted that reply
How ca I join the project ? Website not working.
First thanks for the project, and I’ve signed up and logged in. I studied the guide, and guide images displayed fine. However, attempts to classify images failed, because display area was featureless white. There is a small square icon at the upper left corner of the image area suggesting that there is an attempt to display an image. Perhaps there is software missing on my computer, or some flag that I need to set to enable image display for classifying. Please help.
FYI, I’m using a Dell Inspiron 2305, 64-bit X2 AMD processor 1.6 Ghz, RAM 4 GB, HD 750 GB HD, Windows 7 OS
This is a known issue and the team are working on fixing it. Thanks for letting us know and please keep an eye on this thread on Talk for updates: http://talk.andromedaproject.org/help/discussions/DAP1000a02
Thank you for acknowledging that the blank image display area (in Classify) is a known issue. I’ll watch this thread for the solution to develop.
One suggestion would be to try a different browser. There is some indication that this problem is specific to Internet Explorer. So you could try chrome or firefox; and also check to see if it is fixed already!
The idea to try the project on Firefox rather than Internet Explorer reveals some browser dependence of the program. With Firefox I was able to watch part of the tutorial and classify images, but the login box failed to respond upon a click. Login was successful via the signup box, which has a login option. Once logged in, the display scrolled up to a point where the logout box was obscured almost completely by the top banner of Firefox; Use of the scrollbar failed to make the logout box visible. So operation on Firefox is “squirrely” at this time.
David, try clicking on the zooniverse logo (bullseye with slash through it). This reveals the login/logout area of the screen for me. I don’t think this is a squirrel, but is actually a feature. Your initial login issues do appear to be a bug though.
Thanks anilseth, Clicking on the Zooniverse logo raises and lowers the logoin/logout panel beautifully. Thanks for the help!
very interesting! I like to be part of this research!
Please sign up and join in! http://www.andromedaproject.org/
Sirs,
I understand your task and wish to assist. I’m a Physicist who worked for IBM @ KSC on the Apollo project where I was the Instrument Unit’s reliability engr. as well as the Saturn V rocket’s launch computer’s reliability engr. Retired now with nothing to do, so.. I request to join your team of helpers. Please reply if interested.
Hi Michael, If you want to take part in the project please visit http://www.andromedaproject.org/ and create an account. Then you just need to read the Guide and complete the tutorial in order to start classifying the images. Thanks for your interest!
I’m interested in this! I would love to be part of this!
Hi Ameekha, Please sign up at http://www.andromedaproject.org/ Then you just need to read the Guide and complete the tutorial in order to start classifying the images. Thanks for your interest!
I signed up and logged in. But when I click on the box that says “start classifying”, the program is not responding.
If you’re using Internet Explorer, try a different browser. Sorry for the trouble.