Help write Hitchhiker's Guide to Universe

Astronomers today launched an online project to classify 250,000 galaxies by massive parallel processing using human brains.

Humans are still better at pattern recognition tasks than a computer and there are a lot of them online willing to check through pictures taken of distant galaxies.

More than 150,000 signed up for a Galaxy Zoo project 18 months ago to judge from indistinct images whether a galaxy is spiral or elliptical, and the direction of its rotation. No special astronomical knowledge is needed – you are just looking for shapes.

The response, which resulted in 80 million classifications, astonished the organisers. The volunteers also identified 3,000 cases of galaxies in collision, a comparatively rare event.

Today astronomers launched a second phase of the project, Galaxy Zoo 2, in which volunteers will be asked to look deep into images to find unusual details.

One of the project founders, Dr Chris Lintott of Oxford University, explained: "The first Galaxy Zoo provided us with a Rough Guide to the sky and now we want our users to fill in all the details and create a real Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxies."

Co-founder Dr Kevin Schawinski, of Yale University, said the response from the first phase of the project had been overwhelming. "We've been able to learn a lot about how galaxies evolve and how they relate to their environment. With the detail from Zoo 2, we'll be able to discover even more about how galaxies work."

The digital images used in Galaxy Zoo were taken by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope in New Mexico, and the project has been funded by The Leverhulme Trust and Microsoft.

Details of how to volunteer can be found here.