SPACE.com: The advent of digital photography has caused a dramatic shift in astronomers’ roles. As SPACE.com‘s Mike Wall writes, in the past, discovery was the time-consuming part—where astronomers used crude telescopes and pored over photographic plates. Now, new and advanced telescopes are generating more and more data, and astronomers are struggling to keep up. For example, the telescope at the Palomar Observatory in southern California detects 1.5 million candidate transients—fleeting astronomical phenomena—every night. So, astronomers are writing computer algorithms and using projects such as Galaxy Zoo, which enlists the public to help sift through the mountains of data.
