Study penguins and the stars during your time at home

Love penguins and science? Cooped up at home and looking for something to do?

Become a citizen scientist and help researchers with Penguin Watch to identify penguins from photographs taken automatically near their colonies. Penguin Watch uses satellite images to find masses of penguin feces (commonly called guano by the scientific community).

Researchers use the satellite imagery because it’s difficult to get information in the Antarctic.

“So we can map out how much area is covered in guano, and that gives us a really good estimate of how many penguins were actually at the colony at that particular location," said Heather Lynch, a statistical ecologist at Stony Brook University, in an interview with Space.com.

“Even though penguins are the most charismatic and maybe the most obvious wildlife to survey in Antarctica, until recently, we knew relatively little about how many penguins there were in Antarctica and how their abundance was distributed because surveying Antarctica is so difficult,” said Lynch.

The data collected via Penguin Watch is used in Lynch’s Mapping Application for Penguin Populations and Projected Dynamics Project, which is supposed to gather comprehensive data for policymakers focusing on the Antarctic region.

"The citizen science part of this comes in because there's just so much of Antarctica," said Lynch. "The way that we find penguin colonies is by and large through manual searching of imagery: image after image, foot by foot, scanning the coastline for evidence of penguin guano."

Accurate data is very important if policymakers are to enact legislation to keep penguins safe. It can be difficult to know exactly where penguin colonies are, because they move so frequently.

The other project that citizen scientists can get involved with is called Galaxy Zoo and aims to classify the shapes of galaxies. The shape of a galaxy can tell you so much about it – history, when stars were formed, and when it collided with other galaxies, Chris Lintott told Space.com. Lintott is an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford.  

Find out more or get involved with Galaxy Zoo here.

Learn more or join the citizen scientists and other researchers involved in Penguin Watch here.