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Check out Zooniverse - https://www.zooniverse.org/ - there's a lot of projects that are helped by citizen science. A nice platform where human powered processing can contribute. I don't think there's the kind of review etc you're asking for, but it does have a very nice interface for building your own project, contributing to others etc.

It's odd that Zooniverse https://www.zooniverse.org/ hasn't gotten involved with this. They do all sorts of projects that involve humans categorizing or analyzing images, some quite complicated. I don't know if THIS particular project can be simplified enough for the average Joe to work with, but it might be worth a try.

Software just isn't good at pattern recognition and this is far from the first project to seek the public's help in these type of things, but this could potentially harness more participation than previous attempts. Zooniverse started with getting people to classify types of galaxies, now they have a few dozen science projects that use the pattern recognition humans do better than computers. These areas of science span physics, anthropology, biology, and linguistics, even a project that you can sift through LHC data to help find exotic matter (haven't done that one so I don't know how good it is. I did the Planet Hunters one for a while and they managed to locate 7 exo-planets that year using the Kepler data.

Software can be very good at pattern recognition. However all software is not created equal. I'm not talking about software that the scientists wrote themselves, or some computer science grad that had an image processing class or even a single computer vision class. I'm talking about post grad computer science folks doing research in computer vision. Seriously, the sort of things you describe *are* / *have* been done as computer vision projects. Go to a university library and sit down in the computer vision journals area and start flipping through the journals. I've done that. I've done research in this field.

Now, again, consider that we are talking about lay people with no expertise in the field being briefly and informally trained to do these tasks. This suggests the task is one well within the reach machine evaluation.

Software just isn't good at pattern recognition and this is far from the first project to seek the public's help in these type of things, but this could potentially harness more participation than previous attempts. Zooniverse started with getting people to classify types of galaxies, now they have a few dozen science projects that use the pattern recognition humans do better than computers. These areas of science span physics, anthropology, biology, and linguistics, even a project that you can sift through LHC data to help find exotic matter (haven't done that one so I don't know how good it is. I did the Planet Hunters one for a while and they managed to locate 7 exo-planets that year using the Kepler data.

I am an astronomy professor at a large state university. There are many way in which you can contribute to astronomy as an amateur, while at the same time learn about astronomy. Some have been mentioned in previous answers in this thread:

http://www.planethunters.org/ it is a citizen scientists project that uses actual data from NASA's Kepler Space Telescope to find extrasolar planets that may have been missed by the automatic software used by the professional astronomers. It harvests the "wisdom of the crowd" and the natural pattern recognition in the human brain to find the telltale signature of extrasolar planets that the automated software may have missed. Some planets have already been found this way, and the citizens that found them have been included in the scientific publication: http://arxiv.org/abs/1210.3612

There are other 9 projects using the same infrastructure that use astronomical data to do real research: https://www.zooniverse.org/pro... . Topics go from stars, planet and galaxy formation, solar physics, black holes, asteroids, etc... All these projects use actual data from ground and space based telescopes, and have ample tutorials that explain how the project work and the science behind it in an accessible way. We use this projects in our school to introduce freshmen undergraduates to research as soon as they arrive to our university.

If you own an amateur telescope you can also contribute to the American Association of Variable Stars Observers (AAVSO: http://www.aavso.org/) which despite its name is open to amateur observers all over the world. The association collects data from amateurs to create lightcurves of variable stars. This is an exceptionally important work, because monitoring of bright stars is often overlook by the professional community; yet knowing long term trends in their luminosity is essential to understand stellar evolution, stellar physics and the cosmological distance scale. The AAVSO is organized as a scientific society, and as such has a journal where results are published, scientific meetings, etc. It also has a lot of background material written in a way to be accessible for the public.

That said, I read in the comment thread above that somebody got discouraged in pursuing an academic career in astronomy because "there are no jobs". This is not true. The field is not worse than any other academic field. Surely we are suffering from cuts in science expenditures an education, like anybody else (hint: think about that when you vote next November), but universities, observatories and agencies like NASA are still hiring. New people can still make it in the field, and even if they don't find a job as astrophysicists there are many careers in the private sector where the skills learned while pursuing a Ph.D. in astronomy are welcomed. One collaborator of mine, for example, just got hired to work at a cool startup company in the D.C. area. A student of mine went to work at Lincoln Lab in Boston on remote sensing. Other ex students in our department that decided to leave research went to work in medical imaging (at Mayo clinic), or even making battle plans for F14s on a aircraft carrier (his claim of fame is that he prevented the Navy from declaring war on Venus). Our university, as well universities all over the world, still accept scores of new student in astronomy programs: not everybody remains in astronomy after their degree, but as far as I know the unemployment rate for professionals with an astronomy Ph.D. is close to zero.

One thing about astronomy is that is a very inclusive community: differently than physics, we have an almost equal gender ratio among the young generations. Age also is not a problem, one of the graduate students we admitted this year is a retiree that decided to complete his studies after working for decades in the oil industry. He is having the time of his life.

There is crowdsourcing in which you look for exoplanets or translate ancient greek texts ( https://www.zooniverse.org/ ), crowdsourcing in which your computer folds protein models to better understand disease ( http://folding.stanford.edu/ ), and then there is crowdsourcing in which you test weapons systems to help kill people more effectively. I like how the Pentagon is skipping the recruitment propaganda part (We Need You! *pointy finger*) and just putting a gun in our hands (sic). Its bad enough that the American government spends as much as it does on "defense" without subversively enlisting people to test weapons systems for them. I won't be playing that particular game.

At the closing plenary for the 2011 IA Summit, Cennydd Bowles called out the whole 'UX' (User Experience) community as a whole, in that the role that most of them play is in trying to get people to spend more time on websites and buy more stuff, rather than doing stuff that really improves the world. You've taken a similar stance on 'gamification', but there's at least two groups (Zooniverse and FoldIt) using it for good as they're helping to advance science. Can you think of any other situations where we could use video games to improve the world at a grand scale, and not just simple 'edutainment'?

Way back when I was a freshman in college I was considering a carrier in astronomy and physics, but I opted for the more flashy and showy job of application development. Is there room for hobby astronomers to contribute in a meaningful way to the global community, or should I stick with the crowd-sourcing projects on https://www.zooniverse.org/ ?

You mentioned Galazy Zoo, but there's actually a larger effort called Zooniverse, which includes:

• Old Weather : transcribing temperature information in British Naval Logs to add to the climate record
• Solar Stormwatch : estimating the leading front of Coronal Mass Ejections

... and the other astronomy like stuff.

Besides that, a number of science agencies have various educational resources. From NASA, for 5th to 8th grade:

• http://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/5-8/index.html

Other agencies have stuff too, but I don't know where it all is off the top of my head.

For a detailed explanation see Bill Keels post http://blogs.zooniverse.org/galaxyzoo/2011/01/10/hannys-voorwerp-and-hubble-what-did-we-learn/

Moon Zoo is one of many projects on http://www.zooniverse.org/

It's a great way to learn about the various images/data being captured, both in our solar system and beyond, while actually contributing something to the scientific community. There is something extremely exciting about watching a clip of the sun and seeing a comet appear out of nowhere and zoom around the sun with its tail pointing away. Or being among the first to notice a new solar storm which might affect astronauts in orbit. Or spotting tiny little foot prints on the lunar surface from one of the Apollo missions in one of the images presented! It does get tedious at times, but the little discoveries make it interesting and rewarding overall. Plus they are great learning tools for curious people, both young and old - the scientists seem to frequently answer all sorts of questions on the forums regarding the images, projects and basic science surrounding them.

I'm not associated with any of the projects, I just find them interesting from time to time. I've learned a lot from the projects and have SEEN a lot more of the Universe around me because of them.