To celebrate Citizen Science Day 2019, which is this coming Saturday 13th April, a different member of the Zooniverse team will be posting each day this week to share with you some of our all-time favourite Zooniverse projects. Today, Zooniverse Lead Designer Becky Rother.

Let me start by saying that I am not an astronomer. While I’ve always had an interest in space, I went to school for journalism and design and never considered that there might be a way I would contribute to real astronomy research.

This is where I get SO EXCITED about Zooniverse – it’s a chance for anyone to be able to see the same data that astronomers see and actually make useful contributions to research.

One of my favorite recent astronomy-related projects is Local Group Cluster Search, a project looking for star clusters – groups of hundreds to millions of stars that were born at the same time – to help astronomers understand the origins of the universe. The project has been broken down into a manageable task, and there’s tons of help text to help non-astronomers like me feel comfortable.

This project builds on one of Zooniverse’s legacy projects, Andromeda Project, which was completed in 2013 and resulted in 2,753 identified star clusters. The resulting catalog represents an unprecedented census of star clusters, providing a sample that is currently unmatched in terms of mass completeness and age precision. All thanks to the hundreds of volunteers who contributed 1.82 million classifications over the course of the project’s life!

You can participate in Local Group Cluster Search both on Zooniverse.org and on our mobile app, available for iOS and Android.