See morphology
in a single glance.
A neural network trained on 25,000 labeled galaxies sorts each image into one of five morphological types. Every card below is classified live by the model.
Elliptical
Smooth, ellipsoidal swarms of older stars with little gas, no spiral structure.
Spiral
Disk galaxies with curving spiral arms tracing star-forming regions.
Barred Spiral
Spirals with a luminous central bar of stars feeding the inner regions.
Edge-on Disk
Disk galaxies seen edge-on, often revealing a thin dust lane.
Merger
Two or more galaxies caught mid-collision, tidally disturbed.
Live gallery
Each card calls the model on page load. Ground-truth labels are shown so you can see when it gets it right — and when it doesn't.
Under the hood
Performance on the held-out test set, the model that produced it, and what it gets wrong.
Held-out test accuracy
78.9%
1,917 of 2,430 test images classified correctly
Test set is held out from training — these images were never seen during fine-tuning.
Accuracy by class
- Edge-on Disk93.4%467/500
- Merger85.6%368/430
- Elliptical82.6%413/500
- 69.4%347/500
- Spiral64.4%322/500
Architecture
EfficientNet-B0
4.0M params
Training images
19,445
Galaxy Zoo 2
Epochs
8
AdamW + cosine LR
Classes
5
morphological types
Honest note
The model's real weakness is telling spirals apart from — those two classes share most of their morphology and the bar can be subtle even to human classifiers. Edge-on disks are easy because the silhouette is unmistakable.
Try your own
Drop in any galaxy image. The model returns probabilities across all five classes.
Classify your own galaxy
Drop an image here or click to upload. JPEG, PNG, or WebP up to 8 MB.
Works best with the galaxy centered and roughly filling the frame.