Using powerful telescopes, astronomers are able to take high-quality images of seemingly empty spaces in the night sky. Galaxy Zoo is a citizen science project that collects these images and has volunteers identify what type of galaxy they are (Hart et al. 2016). The three main types of galaxies are elliptical galaxies, irregular galaxies, and spiral galaxies. Spiral Graph is another example of a citizen science project and is led by Dr. Patrick Truedthart and Professor Ian Hewitt. This project has pulled spiral galaxies, as seen in Figure 1, from Galaxy Zoo’s archive to use for further research.

Spiral Graph aims to take measurements of the pitch angles of spiral galaxies. It is often seen that each arm in a single spiral galaxy has its own pitch angle. This makes it difficult to automate the process of measurements as humans are far better at detecting non-logarithmic spirals (Hart et al. 2016). There are also spiral galaxies that include a bar, meaning the arms of the galaxy do not originate from its nucleus, but rather off of the sides of it. Nevertheless, there is a developing computer code called P2DFFT that can be used to measure these unique arcs (Davis et al. 2014). Submissions to Spiral Graph help train this code to understand the complexities of galaxy arms (Hewitt et al. 2020). After data collection, Spiral Graph will compare the pitch angles to other space oddities. The project hypothesizes that there will be a visible pattern in their results. Despite that results and literature for this project are unpublished at this time there is evidence that supports there are existing patterns in the components of spiral galaxies. Studying these patterns will help scientists better understand the interactions between components within a spiral galaxy. Doing so will expand the existing knowledge of how the universe works. The following sections will explain these patterns and where they appear.

Continuing to take pitch angle measurements is crucial to the study of spiral galaxies. Analyzing large sets of data will allow scientists to produce more accurate results that benefit the broader field. By improving the P2DFFT programming the system of pitch angle measurement will likely be more automated in the future. Additionally, if patterns are found in certain measurements and their relation to other space oddities, pitch angle can be used as a proxy to deduce harder-to-record aspects of galaxies.