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They need to convert the visual data into something that any human can identify as falling into group A or group B (or c, etc)

al la Galaxy Zoo.
http://www.galaxyzoo.org/

It's called "citizen science," expanding the concept of things like SETI at home to drawing on the mass capability of interested people.

A good example is GalaxyZoo. People classify images of galaxies online.

Astronomers have already come up with something. It's called galaxy zoo.

http://www.galaxyzoo.org/

As an added bonus, you get to look at some neat deep space photography.

While not quite a game, astronomers already take advantage of semiautomated human pattern recognition: http://www.galaxyzoo.org/

Some amateurs assist these kinds of projects via sites such ash http://www.galaxyzoo.org/ which is a site that asks you to classify galaxies into types such as clockwise-spiral or elliptical etc. I know I like doing this as the skies around where I live are very light polluted so its nice to assist in some way I can, and there is just so much data to go through that all eyeballs are appreciated

Because it is basic game theory? You want the little hamster to continue running around the little wheel you give him a cookie to work for. If he gets little nibbles of the cookie he'll work HARDER trying to get more cookie, thus giving you more work. Hell nobody is saying they have to give them the actual recorded data in real time, just throw the monkey a reward for pushing the button. Maybe something that ONLY shows how you are doing? Surely that would discourage the cranks while giving the hamster a reason to keep running the wheel.

Galazy Zoo, which pioneered this kind of crowd-sourced classification, seems to disprove that need. Most of the people are astronomy fans, and the joy of looking at raw telescope pictures was reward enough. Eventually they did add a list of previously viewed galaxies, and let you mark your favorites for later viewing. Besides, it had 250,000 users. Get each person to look at 20 galaxies on average (just a few minutes time, easy to do) and you have 5 people looking at each of 1 million galaxies.

In other words, crowd-sourcing this kind of stuff either provides its own reward (pretty pictures) or needs no continued participation (because the work can be done by lots of people instead of people spending lots of time).

Yep. Except instead of putting spare CPU cycles to work like SETI@Home, Boinc, etc., the Zooniverse projects put spare user cycles to useful work.

I many times enjoyed getting a buzz and staring at mind staggeringly distant galaxies for an hour or two, with some freakishly talented electric guitarists providing some recorded accompaniment. While I consider it "down time," my friends the astronomers consider it useful work.

Maybe they learned this from the distributed computing folks?

More likely they learned it from the Galaxy Zoo folks.

As well as the usual moon and planets, I'd go for the Pleiades, and Comets that might be around at that time, Messier 31 (Andromeda) and perhaps a binary star.

Check them out yourself before boring the kids, and also check out galaxy zoo.

http://mergers.galaxyzoo.org/how_to_take_part

There are several community astronomy projects.

You can contribute to http://www.galaxyzoo.org/ - it's easy, doesn't require any prior knowledge and might help us make interesting discoveries.

Go see the galaxyzoo
website where people like you and Me catagorize galaxies.
Its human powered picture clasification.

Perhaps looking at cool space images are quite the draw
that Von Braun's Notes can't live up to.

Clearly you did not think of a search interface that would allow the Internet Public to go through 150,000 submissions efficiently without hitting the Google I'm Feeling Lucky barrier as I call it, where if you don't get on the top page you are nobody.

Now you are in trouble and maybe being forced to disclose ahead of time some neat multi-dimensional collaborative interface that isn't out of alpha let alone beta yet, which could be a competitive disadvantage.

Here's what I recommend:
- Take a random sampling and see what percentage are good-looking. You could make something to filter spam but maybe not worth it.
- Get some authority to expand the prize or create runnerups, and announce this.
- Hire more people or, try this (which should be up your alley): Ask for people inside and outside Google to join a submission voting group. You could make subgroups of engineers, professional philanthropy advisors, academics, government, writers, etc. Distribute each submission through at least 1 of each group, and tally the votes.
- Consider Galaxyzoo.org which has a quarter million galaxies to classify and got 70,000 classifications per hour from volunteers within 24 hours.
- Opening things up to the web mean they can be gamed by low income people or robots. Use people where you can, and grade participants so outliers can be disqualified.
- Tell everyone what you are doing.

Heh, I'll bite. Actually, this is version 2 (which came out 2 days ago). The original Galaxy Zoo was launched in July 2007, and only classified galaxies as spiral or not. This is much more fine-grained and allows for significantly better research.

And seriously, 6 jobs in the last 18 months. C'mon!

I live real close to Chicago. On a clear night I can see Venus (if it's not too cloudy here in the midwest). I do most of my skywatching here.

For a distributed human image recognition project I think classify-galaxies-at-home is more rewarding than "find-Fossett's-corpse" (A bit harsh perhaps, but let's not beat around the bush). At least classifying galaxies you get to see some beautiful galaxies that no-one may ever have seen before, and your time will help scientists look for patterns in galaxy types and test theories about galaxy formation.

Clicky

I don't know much about this particular controversy, but it's worth noting that New Scientist is basically the National Enquirer of science journalism, and has a tendency to sensationalize things quite a bit. Here's how things are worded on the actual Galaxy Zoo website:

http://www.galaxyzoo.org/Project2.aspx

But what about the wider Universe? Observing the rotation of galaxies also provides a probe of the large-scale properties of the Universe, and intriguingly there is already some indication from SDSS galaxies that all may not be as it seems! Our current theories about the Universe have it that galaxies should not prefer to rotate one way or the other, and we should therefore observe as many clockwise rotating spiral galaxies as anti-clockwise. This is related to a fundamental assumption we make in cosmology; that there are no special places or special directions in the Universe. Prof. Micheal Long from the University of Michigan has claimed, in his recent astro-ph preprint, that there is a preferred handedness (rotation direction) of galaxies in the local Universe. This is a revolutionary claim, that could force us to rethink our understanding about the underlying nature of space and employ a much more complicated background model for the Universe. The current claim is based on a sample of just 1660 galaxies from the SDSS survey, but a much larger sample is required to assess the significance of the effect which is where Galaxy Zoo comes in.