Hunting Stardust!

It's called Stardust@Home, but it's not like Seti@Home, at least not to my mind. Seti@Home let you watch your computer produce data analysis graphs looking for something you half-believed would never be found by anybody. Stardust@Home is not as well-tuned to the busy person, admittedly, but it does let you play a much more meaningful part. You get to use what they call a "focus movie" to examine amazingly small squares of "aerogel", looking for stardust collected by a satellite. They'll have thousands if not millions of squares to search, and they're only expecting around 40 particles. So yeah, your chances are still not too great. But they have a very good interactive tutorial on the site, and its actually kind of fun. It's not checking to see whether or not the square has a dot. It's adjusting the focus so you can see the very messy surface of the gel, and then adjusting down below the surface to look for tracks that might lead to particles. If you find a previously-unknown particle, you get to name it!

Mind you, I won't have time to do more than a dozen of these once they have it up and running, but it does look like fun. Here's some other notes:
- I read about the Stardust project on the BBC
- Stardust@Home seems to create its virtual microscopes entirely with JavaScript. Not really hard, but somehow neat all the same. My favorite Javascript app so far, even if I do find Google Maps more practical for day-to-day use.
- Stardust@Home uses S3, an Amazon service geared at letting developers have large amounts of web-accessible space. Yay for my employer doing cool and useful things! Though I must admit, it's much cooler coupled with Stardust@Home than in isolation.