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Actually, what you're talking about is interferometry, which is next to useless for detecting moving objects. The problem with interferometry is that it gives you a very narrow field-of-view, which is exactly the opposite of what you want for detecting moving objects.

What the parent poster is talking about is having multiple telescopes looking at the sky independently of one another. Smaller telescopes are better because they're cheaper and they generally have a wider field-of-view. Some projects that are doing things like this are eSTAR and Pan-STARRS.

Actually, what you're talking about is interferometry, which is next to useless for detecting moving objects. The problem with interferometry is that it gives you a very narrow field-of-view, which is exactly the opposite of what you want for detecting moving objects.

What the parent poster is talking about is having multiple telescopes looking at the sky independantly of one another. Smaller telescopes are better because they're cheaper and they generally have a wider field-of-view. Some projects that are doing things like this are eSTAR and Pan-STARRS.

There already are a number of groups that do this. One of them is Spaceguard. There are a few others in the works (eSTAR, Pan-STARRS).

It wasn't clear to me from the article how much reduction these agents are doing to the telescope output, but I imagine there's a good deal of difference between what they are doing and the process you follow in a thorough post-event analysis of the images/spectra/etc?

Actually, no. These days most of the research class telescopes (including UKIRT and the JCMT at the Joint Astronomy Centre in Hawaii) have real time data reduction pipelines. These output publishable quality data, the days of spending six months reducing your data after coming back from an observing run aren't over yet, but we're getting there.

The agents themselves pull the results directly off the data reduction pipeline, and perform real time analysis to see if there is anything interesting by data mining online catalogues and meta-data databases (such as CDS SIMBAD). They they can make a decision to make further observations.

Have a look at the project website for more information.

There's more technical information about the system on the eSTAR Project home page, including screenshots and more specific details about the software.

In the words of the time honoured Spectrum games, Congraturation! You sucsess!

You're exactly right. The eStar project is a robotic telescope network, as well as having various databases of previous observations. The telescopes and the databases can be queried in the same way, with the databases returning rows and the telescopes zooming off to look at the object in question. All of this is controlled in Perl.

This takes some of the glamour out of astronomy in favour of more rapid results. I still remember the images of Hubble sat at the lower end of a very very big telescope, gripping a notebook in one hand and a pipe between his teeth as he readied himself for a night-long observing session. Still, if Larry Wall can find us some aliens then more power to him, I say.

GRID Computing is the current sexy term in scientific computing, but its something that is so vague that it can mean all things to all people. Which is perhaps why its suddenly so popular, everyone can get their pet project funded.

To some people it means actualy hardware, routers, fibre, supercomputers, that sort of thing. Certainly in the UK and Europe this group consists mostly of Particle Physicists, see the GridPP Project Homepage for details of whats going on there...mostly the Particl Physicsts seem to have ridiclous amounts of data on their hands (Petabytes/day) that they have to ship. Fun stuff!

To the astronomical community it means software, virtual observatories, data mining and intelligent agents. In the UK and Europe have a look at the AstroGrid and the AVO projects. Although some of us are talking about hardware, the project I'm working on for instance, eSTAR, is putting robotically operated telescopes onto the GRID. However even here the main focus of the project is on the fun stuff we can do with the software, intelligent agents and data mining spring immediately to mind. In the US the NVO is the main focus of GRIDs for the astronomers there...