Slashdot Mirror
Democratizing Space
ContinuousPark writes: "According to this Wired News piece, Microsoft Research is working on a huge Internet database (similar to the TerraServer) that will make the data from a massive survey of the cosmos available to anyone with a Web browser. The project, called SkyServer, is the first in a series of initiatives to bring to the public "virtual telescopes". The data (about 40 terabytes) will come from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. This means that, with just an Internet connection, I will be able to use the world's best telescopes and do my own research, maybe discover some celestial objects that have always been there but no one's had the (available telescope) time to look at/for them. "
Actually, it's time to debunk the myth that Science Can Only Be Done By Scientists and I mean capital-S scientists.
There's this priesthood, you see, and they've put out a lot of hype about how only they can conduct the rituals....
Study some history: in the early days of Scientific Revolution there were not a lot of tenured eggheads who had never made their way in the real world.
Don't be silly! If it's anything like TerraServer, what you'll get over the net is 8 bit JPEG or something like that. Far from good enough to do even the most basic research. The bare minimum would be 14- or 16-bit, uncompressed or losslessly compressed, data in multiple color bands (and astronomers do not, of course, use RGB as their color bands). Would you even know what do do with a 16 bit, 2k x 2k, H-alpha band image (say, in FITS format), even if you had it? Would you even know how to display it?
No, this will at most be an educational tool, and a fun toy for idle surfers (just like TerraServer -- it's fun to try to find your house, but that's not real work, is it?). This is not going to turn couch potatoes into research astronomers.
I like the idea. We paid (with our tax dollars) for these tools anyway. Therefore we ought to be able to use them. Now then, if they would just point the Hubble at...
I mean, supposedly these Astonomers can predict the future by looking at the stars, but I don't see how 1/12 of the worlds population can have the same future, so I think they are con-artists. In fact sometimes my horoscope is so far out it is almost the opposite of what happened to me.
Given the fact we can never visit the places we are looking at through the telescopes (indeed some of them have ceased to exist by the time the light reaches Earth) it seems to be a total waste of time. Why not spend the money on looking into the deep oceans of planet Earth. At least that exists right now.
It worries me somewhat that the government appears to be funding research into the pseudo-science of Astronomy, while there are legitimate astrologers out there doing real useful research (Hubble, Mars polar lander) and not making outrageous claims of predicting the future, who are underfunded. I'd like to see a more intelligent allocation of these resources.
Finally am I the only one who thinks this is all a bit arrogant of mankind to try and understand the mystical workings of the universe which is likely to be beyond his comprehension anyway ? Its like trying to find the meaning of that 2-week old perl script you wrote one morining at 3am wired up on caffiene and pizza. You know you are going to fail.
so that's why the sky is blue..
This is yet another publicity stunt from Microsoft, admittedly a more cunning one than usual. Astronomy is something which takes a lot of training and knowledge, and allowing every kid with a glint in their eye to pretend that they are doing something "worthwhile" is just being silly. There are far more worthwhile projects out there than this.
The only reason that MS are doing this is to give a nice cover story for them trying out some new database and server technology. They're not doing it for any other reason, and anyone fooling themselves into thinking that is both naive and deluded.
What is it with all these "do your own science" projects that keep popping up recently? Why do people insist on thinking that they can do what scientists spend years learning in their spare time at home without any clue about the subject? People, stop fooling yourselves and leave science to the scientists.
The article has no mention of whether this will be free or a subscription service, but it goes against a lifetime's experience for me to believe Microsoft is giving away something for free. I'm sure if it is free, there will be all sorts of restrictive licensing on it (you may not use this data for any thing other than personal research, you may not publish this data etc. etc.)
Of course, I am assuming that you intend to publish the fruits of your research. After all, what is the point of doing interesting reseacrh and keeping it to yourself? This service may not be the tool to empower amateur astronomers that it potentially could be.
Posting anonymously as a protest against moderation
Haha hahaha hahahah hahha hahaha. Stop that stop that
Smart guy. Hilarious anti-Microsoft knee-jerk reaction. Ho ho ho ho ho ho ho.
D00d you forgot to call them Micro$oft. That would have made your post even more funny than it already is. Ha ha ha ha ha ROTFLMAO.
I mean, don't get me wrong, I am as much of a Linux zealot and Micro$haft hater as the next Slashdot poster, but this Micro$oft ba$hing is just played out. Why not just ignore them ? You are getting Linux zealotry/advocacy a bad name. I suggest you take a look at the Linux Advocacy HOWTO before posting again.
thank you
I don't believe redshift is available for the
majority of the survey.
-Paul Komarek
I don't know, I've seen a very slow SkyView in the middle of linkage from APOD (Astronomy Picutre of the Day), one of the world's best web pages to wake up to. Browse the APOD Archive or Index, especially if you have a fast connection and enjoy looking into the universe.
--
A word of advice to you would be arm chair astronomers. You will get much more pleasure and gratification stargazing through your own telescope and taking your own astrophotos than you will sitting on your ass and passively crusing though a M$ website, where for every pitcure you see you will also see a banner ad. I do not call this democratizing space, I call it dumbing it down.
Does anyone remember the Microsoft "street maps" demo they tried a while back (when MS stopped calling the Internet a fad, round 1997)?
Basically they set up this IIS/Access/SQL Server setup which served out *terrabytes* of data, and made the most of this PR.... hey Oracle can serve TerraBytes so can we. Essentially they turned the setup into a barely useful database which acted as a HTTP: server. We got a lot of laughs over the Pointy Ones who would tell us this was ready to replace Solaris + Oracle (maybe to index and serve your MP3 collection that's about it).
Expect the 40 terrabytes figure to be repeated. MS should just focus on true clustering... at least then users can factor in tripple redundancy and fully automate the daily reboot process.
:-/
At NAB 2000 I got to play with Mac OS X on PowerPC. Very neat little UNIX OS... can't wait to see how it runs games. The Blue Box, or 'compatability mode' wasn't as fast as I thought it would be, at least running evil MS Internet Extender... slight video tearing on PPC 500 (the native browser, not MSIE, was quick tho). Should be an interesting year for UNIX...
I love living in alaska, You go to your lunch hour during the winter at a nice resturant and watch the lovely sunrise and sunset then go back to work by 1pm.
// Zarf //
I live only a few miles from the artic circle. Someone please give me a job so I can move!?!
-
[signature]
Oh wait, I think I do, but I'm not going to get on that topic today (and no, it's not a MS rant, but more generally. If you were at CFP and saw Diffie's address, you'll have some idea).
--
--
The Internet is the Suppository of All Knowledge. You get it in the end.
Well, it's not just that Navigator tends to crash, it's that JavaScript (specifically the navigator object) was pretty poorly designed to begin with.
For example, a page can trap the File+Exit event from your browser making it impossible to quit or close a window. Who thought up that feature? Your e-mail address and other browser settings can be uploaded to sites without you realizing it. Loads of other minor security flaws that can only be solved by disabling JavaScript can be found in both IE and Netscape.
I like the core idea of the DOM and JavaScript. Too bad it's not sandboxed better.
But, to stay on topic, none of the scripty menus seem to work with Netscape 6PR1. It's probably IE-specific stuff.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
It had been thought you need original data
resolution to do the best astronomical research.
However, several near disasters in space probes
proved otherwise. First, when the main attenna
on the Galileo Jupiter probe failed, the backup
attenna was nearly a hundred times slower.
However, with reprogrammed compression, the probe
gets about 70% of its originally planned capacity.
Galileo re-orbits a major moon about every month
and in the meantime slowly transmits the several
dozen pictures it records each pass. Galileo is
now on a triple extended mission, because it had
survived five years beyond its original two year design time. The slow transmission time however
gobbles up large fraction of the deep space net resources.
The first three years of the Hubble Space was
a similar situation. The mis-focused mirror
required computer post-processing refocusing.
This works in some astronomical cases, but fails
elsewhere. The reprocessed pixels aren't as good as you'd like.
Look at who writes the articles in Sky and Telescope magazine.
Look at who discovers new comets and supernovea.
There is a lot of sky out there, lots of interested
amateurs, too few professional positions.
I'll accept my nobel prize after I finish my breakfast.
NS navigator 4.7, linux glibc2.1, works fine for me...
Have you even seen the sun set...at 3 p.m.?
(ayre, once, while sailing 'round the arctic circle...)
--
+&x
Of course, lets just hope someone has time to actually wait for the server to respond...
Terraserver seems to either be down more than its up or else its just that I never seem to have the free time to click reload until I get an actual response out of it.
Color coding, while one technique, is not a particularily good one. Just taking successive b&w shots is sufficient to detect moving objects. Comparing this database to known charts would be exceptionally dumb, since for a lot of people the database is the known chart. The original surveyors would already have done anyway.
when MS does cool sh*t like this, it makes it hard to hate them.
-confused
I guess viewing pictures from this database will not be possible with anything else but Microsoft webbrowsers.
//Pingo
--- Linux or FreeBSD, it's like blondes or brunettes. I like both. ---
No doubt! I for one am looking forward to it. It's a much better idea than terraserver. I'm wondering exactly how much will be available though. I'm assuming all the pictures will be pretty sterile. I wonder if we'll actually be able to see high quality nebula photos and such. Now that would be cool.
Actually, not necessarily. You could discover something new just by comparing the images to current star charts. If the *current* charts don't show it, it's possible that you've found something new. Of course, I don't know how often publicly available charts are updated.
The method you're referring to, AFAICT, is what one would use to find moving objects. For instance, that is the way they found the Shoemaker-Levy comet. It involves taking three frames of red blue and green and overlaying them on top of each other. Stationary objects will show up as white, moving objects will show up as three colors.
I had the rare opportunity to study under one of the people involved with this project. Dr. Michael Vogeley, at Drexel University, actually presented a colloquium to us on this very subject. The methods they are using to detect and study some of these objects are actually quite ingenius, using plates with holes packed with optic fiber directing light from specific areas of the sky into the CCD's so that more light can be gathered on that one area and more distant objects studied. Not to mention, their lofty goal of mapping the largest chunk of the local universe ever mapped will be coming in a WELL below what most research projects are costing these days. This was easily the most fascinating colloquim I have ever attended at Drexel. If anyone here ever has a chance to attend a seminar or lecture (or better yet, a class) by Dr. Vogeley, I strongly suggest doing so.
Tell a man that there are 400 Billion stars and he'll believe you
Actually, the SDSS telescope does more than just the visual spectrum; It also does UV and such. The data thats being made available on the web will be a refined, processed, and filtered version of the raw data collected at SDSS. And as far as amateur astronomers go, I know quite a few REAL astronomers and cosmologists who are excited about having the data at their fingertips like this. This will be the largest collection of astronomical data ever made widely available. Also, on a side note, SDSS won't be the only 'scope whose data is included... I forget the names offhand, but there are at least two others, the data from which will be all interlinked and searchable... VERY cool stuff, and quite exciting to us budding physicists
Tell a man that there are 400 Billion stars and he'll believe you
I'm actually pretty surprised that this got moderated up.
Theres just a strong sentiment of cynicism on hear today. There'd probably be as many negative comments if it was "Microsoft decides to scrap SkyServer project". If you don't like the idea, don't go to it, but personally, I'm glad that it will be up there. One more cool thing (even if it doesn't provide a lot of functionality for me) on the net.
As far as bandwidth, did anyone notice a significant slowdown after terraserver opened? If there's too much traffic, it'll slow down, and fewer people will go to it. Its like an economics problem.
If MS does get split up, forget the apps, forget the OS, give me MS SQL Server. They're clever enough to show off their product with Terra and Sky server. Plus, SQL Server 7 is top notch. Bottom line.
Troll Like a Champion Today
Similar, but the big advance would be to have a dstributed collection of databases and telescopes. The system would automatically select the best telescope to use for any given observation. You just tell the system what you want to see, and it gets it for you...
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
Hey, if M$ is giving the access to the data, maybe it'll come at a hidden price. Every time you look at the sky you'll see, "Where do you want to go today". *shudder*
I can't think of anything that takes up that much space. How do they deal with that much data? Do they compress it? (Maybe make it into one big jpeg ... just a joke).
Let me give you some idea for the current state of the survey: we're taking a number of "test" strip scans of portions of the sky, and have perhaps 2 or 3 out of roughly 50 or 60 scans done so far. There's still an issue with calibrating the data, but we're working on it. The data is put on tape at the mountain, shipped by FedEx to Fermilab, and they reduce the heck out of it with pipelines specially designed for the survey. The data goes into a database at FNAL, and a copy is sent to JHU. I believe that Microsoft would work with a copy of the JHU database. Some of the JHU astronomers are building a friendly querying system so that people can ask questions like:
Give me info on all the stellar objects in this tiny area of the sky, with colors (g-r) 2.0, and with no close companions
The database will also allow people to download little "postage-stamp" sized pictures of the sky which are cut out around all detected objects.
You can see some examples of pictures (and detected objects) at:
http://a188-l009.rit.edu/richmond/sdss/showtell
As another poster stated, we look at each piece of the sky only once (well, small sections twice), so finding motions or variability from this data alone won't be easy.
The survey won't be finished, in my opinion, until sometime around 2003 or so (for the imaging half of the survey -- the spectroscopic section of the survey will take another few years after that). There is some period of a year or so -- it's rather vague at this point -- before data is released to the public. I'm not sure if it's a year or two after the photons are collected, or a year or two after they have been calibrated and placed into the database. It's possible that a small subset of the commissioning data might be made available sometime before then, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
I'd be happy to answer questions about the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, if someone wants to set up an
interview mechanism (hint, hint).
Michael Richmond "This is the heart that broke my finger."
mwrsps@rit.edu http://stupendous.rit.edu
It's a pretty sad world when we have to worry about our browsers crashing because of HTML/Javascript they read. Isn't it true that correctly written software should _never_ crash on any input?
BTW, does the erroneous javascript crash Mozilla as well? Might make a nice bugzilla bug.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
Not totally true. There are various surveys of the sky that count the distribution of various objects throughout the universe. For example, distribution of galaxies in a 3D space, and what their structural distribution is, such that theories of inflation can be formulated.
I don't know exactly what data is included with the Sloan survey. I should, though, because I saw some spectrographs of the first Sloan data a few weeks ago (they were many months old by then). If Sloan is full of spectrums, then you've got nice spectrums of the whole sky, which means ALOT of data to process. And alot of information is included in the spectrum. for a 2-D map of the sky, and a spectrum at each point, that's a 3D data set. Lots of info can be extracted from this.
make world, not war
Refresh my memory; should it actually be able to get down to 25 magnitudes V filter? I thought Keck reached just a shade over 26, with almost an order greater collection area, among other things. (I should know the answer to this, but (like plenty of others here) figure I should also be entitled to relinquish intelligent thought when reading /. ....)
:}
I wonder if there was a particular choice to their section of the sky being surveyed, or if it was mainly observ/operational requirements.
Since you mentioned the significant additional work that could/may/will be done on these images, and the issues with their auto-processing, I wonder if they will also release raw(-er) data for better reduction, if nothing else. I can see plenty of potential shortcomings with their, in some areas, one-size-fits-all "pipelines." Seems like better, more frustrating by-hand work on many of these image strips will often be necessary. And massive deconvolution reps on terabytes of images...yum...and tedium...wow. And heck, people will be doing statistical surveys of these data for decades.
BTW, kudos to Hemos for a (rare) "real" astronomy info post, albeit under the guise of a Microsoft story.... And seriously, thanx to, in this case, the resident astronomers for taking the time to give info and the straight scoop on the story(ies). (Helpful for those of us who don't keep up on every line of astrophysical research underway.)
As for the comment on success of distributed public image processing, I dunno in this case; analyses of part of LMC are far less sexy than being part of the search for LGM.
Kurtis
On their "Data Processing Challanges" page:
But as has been said, it's unlikely that the full database will be available to individuals (through SDSS or even less likely, Microsoft (bandwidth/media=$) Heck, do you know what the fragile, insured, etc. postal rates would be for 25TB worth of DATs!?) :)
Cheers,
K
The TerraServer was a great idea and I think that this project will end up being just as neat.
;)
I love the idea of being able to look at pictures of the entire sky! It may not be a great tool for Astronomy research but it will be a great tool for learning more about constalations and such. It will also be great for getting more people interested in Astronomy. I applaud Microsoft for getting involved in these really neat projects, whatever their motives are.
Plus, being able to look at Area51 was pretty neat. Perhaps we'll get a good view of something interesting in the Sky? Perhaps some closeups of Mir
forge
If Microsoft finances or owns this kind of database, and it is successful, and many people start using it - how long do you think you will be able to visit this site with Netscape, or Opera?
Long version:
For some years now Microsoft has been sending their people throughout the world collecting data, old arts collections, exclusive online publishing rights from museums and historical sites, and so on. Of course, Microsoft realizes that they cannot hold their monopoly on operating systems forever, and so they are looking for other hooks into the market.
This would not be such a bad thing at all if Microsoft was a fair player. But Microsoft's history has been known to buy, misuse or extinguish new technology just for the sake of forcing new Windows versions and applications into the market (which nobody would actually have needed, if Microsoft hadn't created an artificial "need"). And that is bad.
So: Don't be surprised if in 2001, this 40 Terabyte database tells you you need to install the latest ActiveZ plugins and the latest Internet Explorer 2000 to view the data. And, oh yes - you'll need Microsoft Wallet 2000 of course. It's a free service, after all.
I wouldn't.
</black_vision>
Home Page
Being in a somewhat jaundiced mood at the moment, my first reaction to this story was that MS Research's time would be much better spent on identifying and correcting the reasons for the lack of professionalism that seems to be endemic at all levels in the company. Top officers clearly believe the company has no obligation to behave as a good corporate citizen; communications engineers cheerfully appropriate previously unused fields in the Kerboros protocol for their own use without bothering to discuss it first in the appropriate IETF forum; code-bashers incorporate elaborate toys and juvenile jibes at rivals into software that is sold for serious business use; amd quality control is so slack that the mischief isn't caught.... Arrrgh.
Sorry about the rant, normal service will be resumed after imbibing a beer or two.
That's an easy one. Didn't you notice the timing of Terraserver coincided with the release of MS SQL Server 7.0? This is the same thing. They are trying to show that their software is scalable, fast, robust, other buzzword, more buzzwords, etc.
They are trying to show off their software and the Northwind sample database really doesn't show off the ability to store multiple gigs of data.
-- Freedom means letting other people do things you don't like.
Well I go to Ryerson, and interestingly enough, I have heard that this multi-terrabyte web server isn't currently being put to much use, maybe we can suggest something to faculty... any ideas?
I want to see more of this kind of stuff from Sun and other large companies of comparable scale.
Not so, so-called "virtual observatories" are becoming a hot topic in astronomy. See, for example this "vision statement" for the Virtual Observatories of the Future conference being held at Caltech in June (which I may be going to, if I can get my ass into gear). See also the Digital Sky Project, which has links to the major efforts underway. (Note that the surveys don't even need to be digital: the single most useful project in astronomical history is probably the Palomar Sky Survey, orignally undertaken in the 1950s.)
A quote from the vision statement: For the first time in the history of astronomy, we will have data sets whose full information content greatly exceeds the original purposes for which the data were obtained. This opens the new field of data-mining of digital sky surveys, using the data for newly conceived projects and exploring the vast data parameter spaces. It is inevitable that the previously poorly explored parts of the observable parameter space will contain new discoveries and surprises.
And again: We will be able to tackle some major problems with an unprecedented accuracy, e.g., mapping of the large-scale structure of the universe, the structure of our Galaxy, etc. The unprecedented size of the data sets will enable searches for extremely rare types of astronomical objects (e.g., high-redshift quasars, brown dwarfs, etc.) and may well lead to surprising new discoveries of previously unknown types of objects or new astrophysical phenomena. Combining surveys done at different wavelengths, from radio and infrared, through visible light, ultraviolet, and x-rays, both from the ground-based telescopes and from space observatories, would provide a new, panchromatic picture of our universe, and lead to a better understanding of the objects in it. These are the types of scientific investigations which were not feasible with the more limited data sets of the past.
The real Captain Avatar is a fictional character, so I suppose he doesn't mind if I impersonate him.
I find this absolutely offensive! I started working on SkyView nearly seven years ago! The very first web interface went live in March of 1994. Since 1996, SkyView has been called itself "The Internet's Virtual Telescope."
I can understand that Microsoft is trying to generate enthusiasm and good PR for this, but it shouldn't be at the expense of accuracy and truth.
If you don't feel like waiting for Microsoft to make good and want to see pretty pictures (that also mean something to the professionals) check out SkyView . It already contains the Digitized Sky Survey which is an all-sky optical survey comprised of the Palomar plates made back in the 50's for the northern hemisphere and the SERC Southern Sky Survey for the southern hemisphere.
In addition, SkyView goes beyond the optical and has dozens of surveys ranging from radio wavelengths to gamma-rays.
For those who are curious as to how it works, you type in a coordinate or name of object you're interested in as well as the survey(s) you want to view. Your request then is processed and the image is literally created on the fly to match your specifications. For example, in the case of the Digitized Sky Survey, your request will typically be a composite of 10s of compressed images mosaicked together to produce a final image. This is also the reason why it may take up to a minute to display an image (it's a lot of geometric manipulation).
Also, as to not leave out other possibilities, if all you're looking for is optical images, the Space Telescope Science Institute has a DSS archive. It contains First and Second generation images ( SkyView currently only has the First), though it cannot mosaic across different plates whereas SkyView can.
Finally, yes, I have a bit a vested interest in this. I wrote 95-99% of the code for SkyView up until I left a year ago (now in the capable hands of Laura MacDonald with Tom McGlynn as the principal investigator and originator).
Someone or some group may come along and do it better, but I hope they don't forget those who came before them and are here while they talk of what they'll do in the future.
Besides, who do you trust for your astronomy, NASA or Microsoft? (no Martian spacecraft were harmed in the creation of SkyView )
--Keith Scollick scollick@stsci.edu
Really though, it is always good to share knowledge. This will give amateur astronomers and anyone interested access to data that would otherwise take a very long time to obtain, or that they may not have been able to obtain on their own at all. This provides the possibility of new things being discovered, and more research being done more easily.
I've heard a lot about services like the Star Naming service. Is this finally a way to verify that they're not selling the celestial equivalent of Florida swampland?
==
"This is the nineties. You don't just go around punching people. You have to say something cool first."
It's going great. Asteroids as much more fun than galactic structure anyway. Now who are you?
You leave a long list of suspects. I'd guess. Care to hint?
AC or not AC -- that is the question: /. effect, the turnaround's delay,
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The rules and exceptions of outrageous moderation
Or to take arms against a sea of flames
And by structuring end them. To troll -- to whore
No more; and by a test to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural mistakes
That Slashdot is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To troll -- to whore.
To flame -- perchance to bomb: aye, there's the rub!
For in that post of flame what flames may come
When we have shuffled of this moderation scheme,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
that makes calamity of so long lists.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of karma whoring
Th' console operators wrong, the linked sites crash,
The pangs of despis'd
The insolence of cowards, and the spurns
That patient posting of crafted flamebait takes
When he himself might his quietus make
Who would this zealot site bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary language,
But that the dread of something different
The undiscover'd country, from whose bourne
No negative karma returns -- puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make anonymous cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn away
And lose the name of AC.
.
Take all good things in moderation, including moderation.
For once, it seems that Microsoft is doing something good for the public at large...I suppose you could subtract a couple of points for the Javascript-induced Netscape crashes on their website, but, over all, I think this is a pretty cool thing. Kudos!
A genius writes code an idiot can understand, while an idiot writes code the compiler can't understand.
the /. phenomenon usually only applies for front-page postings, not comments, and nasa usually has pretty nice servers up, if the jpl server could take the day after the mars pathfinder landed, I'm sure this skyview deal can take it :)
>Microsoft would like to demonstrate that their >SQL server really can deal with large amounts of >data I think they also would like to have the word "democratizing" associated with their name. Next stunt: M$ will make available EVERY income tax form free of charge!!! Just go to ms.com, look at some banner adds then get forwarded to www.irs.gov.....which already provides them.
You don't need to. A snail experiences relativistic effects, just in too small a way to measure. Sufficiently accurate scientific clocks can measure the effect caused by travelling at airliner speeds for several hours. (I've seen this demonstrated)
How is this any different from any other form of science?
Science should check the results of predictions, and if the predictions are wrong, use these results to correct or disprove the theory.
Admittedly a lot of scientists can be too arrogant to admit that their theory might be wrong. I don't think they deserve to be called scientists either (even if they do turn out to be right).
... is the One True Ping. All-powerful, invincible, in existence somewhere orbiting a nameless star.
// zyqqh
They created the DB for something else. Maybe a compile farm or something. Or a /. archive (include cached pages of eveything ever linked to :)
...micro$oft universe: what do you want us to own today?
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
[joking?]Hmm, Microsofts Terraserver is slow, unresponsive and currently covers very little non-US ground.
Microsoft last year posted details of a bug where either the earth revolves the wrong way or the software shows it revolving the wrong way. And we are going to trust them to show us satellite images? [/joking?]
I can't actually see what Microsoft will get out of it - except maybe 'subscription charges' - I didn't see any mention of the images being free, did you?
And has anyone else noticed how MS have many many fingers in many similar pies ATM... hmm. Are they getting deals sorted incase they are split into 'Baby-Bills' - each 'section' will then have established products covering practically everything!
Richy C.
--
This isn't necessarily the case; The question we have to ask (and eventually answer) is whether or not gravity has a speed with which it propagates, or if it is an instant force; If it propagates, then you're wrong (though the starlight could be argued to be having some effect, however infinitestimal) and if it's an instant force, then you're right.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The 'battery slice' of this system is the first step toward the ultimate laptop which will be almost 100% battery by weight, with the remaining %age for cpu, display, storage and case.
I operate the VLT (Very Large Telescope) for ESO. The ESO/ESA ASTROVIRTEL is a similar idea, and it is working now.
On the odd chance anyone is still reading this thread....
Apparently there are some problems with the Wired article. The SkyServer.org website is owned by CalTech, who is not a SDSS participant, and their project is open to everyone who willing to contribute data for their National Virtual Observatory. In other words, this observatory will have everything not just the SDSS.
This Microsoft site will not be the official distribution of the SDSS. In fact, that will be done through the SDSS with a completely different database.
The final design of this National Virtual Observatory has not been decided. The article only mentions one possible design.
The science database has gone through multiple revisions and at least two different companies before this annoucement, neither of which could handle the size and variety of data and data queries in the science database. Nonetheless, a deal with MS is quite a surprise. The SDSS, up til now, has been a Linux and Solaris only place.
They don't need to - they have measurable values and predictable functions by which to determine these values. You don't.
Taken to its logical conclusion, if you were to take a space trip require extended periods of near-light speed, you would come back to Earth and find that time had passed much moe quickly here than for you on the ship. Your grandchildren could have grown old and died already by time you arrived.
First of all, what happen to your notion that this is all proven? You're making considerable stretches here - while I obviously don't understand the depths of Feynmann's theories, its quite clear that you don't either.
The approach you are taking is what is known as "pseudo-science" - you're attempting to place scientific rigor in a critical juncture of your own argument, but it clearly doesn't fit, and its obvious you aren't even sure where to place it.
Some of them aren't even there now, even though their light still reaches us.
If your theory of entanglement holds true, then we are being acted upon by forces we cannot see or measure yet, as their light hasn't hit us - looking at existing stars is meaningless.
You really should stay under your pyramid. It looks like you're comfy there.
Very interesting read about some of the weirder aspects of QM they've discovered in the last decade - stuff that is both a particle and a wave at the same time for instance.
You're not the only one who has read up on QM - I've certainly read enough to know that the connection you make between physics and your self-fulfilling prophecies isn't just tenuous, its ridiculous. But in this post-modern era, your use of pseudo science to bolster a ridiculous argument is predictable.
Self-fulfilling prophecies do not an experiment make.
But the point still stands - distant objects can affect you through various quantum mechanical non-local interactions.
None of which you really understand. I don't either, thats why I don't try to form psycho-babble arguments based loosely on what I can gleam from them.
How is the light inluencing us? Back up your assertion - by the way - arguments of "mass" don't apply to photons in the same way as you've been tossing about so far, so the best I can see you telling me at this point is that looking up at the stars makes me feel all giddy inside.
These "forces we cannot see or measure yet" are called gravity, which, as the structure of spacetime, certainly affects us even though we cannot measure its subtle effects.
Blah Blah Blah - this is drivel. Back to the pyramid power convention with you.
Hold on here. I wonder who was trolling whom here?
It is very easy to refute Mach's principle as the rubish, since Mach's assume a spinning bucket, but, as we know from good old Greek Zennon, motion does not exist. So please tell me how can you spin the bucket if there is no motion at all?
I'm commenting on how much pseudo-scientific trolling Anonymous Coward has said in this whole discussion:
Go to the NASA Digital Sky Survey and play around.
Now MS marketing will ask, "Is there any way we can make the cosmos proprietary so we can close source the night sky?"
// Zarf //
-
[signature]
Traditionally the original data outside of press
releases is the for the use of the principal
investigator. This allows them priority publication in reward for years of prepatory work. After a year, the data is generally
freely available at the cost of copying,
and the competence of the data archive centre (sometimes not too competent).
There are exceptions depending on principle investigator. Lot of Mars pathfinder imagery
was posted on the web within days of its acquisition.
Maybe this is also going to be useful for the astronomy community. I would put more stake into a publically funded project that's supervised and implemented by astronomers and without any kind of commercial angle. Even today, though, I suspect that anybody who is interested in getting data can easily get it over the Internet, in the worst case by sending E-mail.
Absolutely. The only way to do anything useful, other than plot the positions of certain objects in space, you need to have a telescope and lots of time. You need to look at spectra, measure variability in magnitudes, etc. for stars. For bodies like comets and asteroids, this is totally useless. For those, you need to have time with live data. The only way to discover these things is by taking successive images of the same area, and checking to see whats moving between the images (they call it blinking).
Other than being a neat project to look at the stars, this has very little scientific research. The only thing I could come up for a use of it is to wait 100 years, and do another survey and measure the proper motions of the stars more precisely between the two images. This is simply just a neat toy.
Don't get me wrong however, I'm very happy that they're generating astronomy awareness.
As far as bandwidth, did anyone notice a significant slowdown after terraserver opened? If there's too much traffic, it'll slow down, and fewer people will go to it. Its like an economics problem.
.... I'd also take Oracle 8i over SQL Server anyday... but then again, you're the expert on Internet technology ;-)
umm... you're just a fool if you actually believe that you can attribute lack of bandwidth to terraserver. I think there are more worthy targets like the mp3 revolution, and other warez.
Yep. Sure do. You really almost hafta use motors unless you are taking pictures of the moon, sun, or the bright planets. Anything over a two second or so exposure through a telescope and you need motors.
Also note that I am using the ultra cheap method of CCD imaging - a Connectix QuickCam.
I did not mean for my posting to suggest that Celestron is the only game out there. I am just very familar with their equipment. Sorry if it came out that way.
Well, could this be made into an app like SETI@Home? A nice distributed app that runs on all sorts of computers with some pretty screensaver (maybe of the current pics being processed) might be something people really like. Even just a catalogue would be pretty extensive. But if a whole lot of people each proccess one picture, it might be worth it.
-cpd
Doesn't the search for heavenly bodies require analysis over time, and not simply an image?
Not necessarily. One of the single most useful sky surveys ever performed was the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey which took deep photographs of the entire northern hemisphere sky in the 1950s. Those photos were re-analyzed by folks at the US Naval Observatory in the 1990s to create the largest database of stars ever created: 526,230,881 stars, all in the Milky Way. In addition, the Hubble team digitized all the POSS photos and put them on the web, which has generated an explosion of new research from folks who may not have had access to copies of the old photographic plates.
The Sloan survey will do a similar thing, but it is digital and can detect objects much fainter. By the end we may have a catalog of galaxies outside our Milky Way which rivals the size of the USNO stellar database.
USNO database: http://ftp.nofs.navy.mil/projects/pmm/
Note, I can't say much about the Microsoft effort. I just know that NASA/USNO work with the POSS have been enormously valuable to astronomers, and I hope that Microsoft makes this new access method for the Sloan Survey as useful.
One of the comments in the article was that you can do research on this that couldn't be done before because people couldn't get enough telescope time. I don't think the conclusion follows, but there are certainly telescopes you can get time on and control online. See:
http://www.eia.brad.ac.uk/rti/automated.html
for a list of some examples. I don't have the link here but IIRC there was a story about 6 months back about a school using one of these to discover a new comet.
Almost ten years ago, I had a similar idea, which I called SkyTelNet. SkyTelNet was to have a network of telescopes, combined with a distributed network of databases. A person would be able to define an "observation query" which would use standard astronomic terms to define the observational data that the user is looking for. The system would allow you to specify observations both in the past and the future. For past observations, the system would search its collective databases, finding observations that were the best match. For future observations, the system would assign the observational task to an automated telescope suited for that particular observation.
The system would also queue observations, keeping copies of the observations at multiple locations. For future observations, the system would be smart enough to match multiple observation queries into a single observation task. A thousand people wanting to watch a particular astronomic event might be able to have a single telescope take one observation, and then "slice and dice" it to provide each of them with exactly what they were looking for.
I had wanted to do this as a senior project in college, but the University of Miami (Florida) is not strong on astronomy, and I had a hard enough time getting anyone to understand my idea, and no luck finding a professor to oversee the project (sigh). I am glad to see this though; I guess all great ideas find a way into the light. If anyone at Microsoft, or anyone else wants to know more about my ideas, I can send you the early drafts describing it.
(For anyone doubting my chronology, just consult the list of well known ports, SKYTELNET has been on the list for about ten years now...)
--- Generation X: The first generation to have SIG lines inferior to their parents... ---
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
Then you have already lost the argument. For a hypothesis to become a theory it has to have rigorous peer review and be tested. If results are not conclusive then it is rejected. I checked my horoscope and it was wrong. I have friends who have bad horoscopes as well. To me that is enough evidence to show that there is a fundamental problem with the hypothesis. It is therefore not a theory and is flawed
Molog
So Linus, what are we doing tonight?
So Linus, what are we going to do tonight?
The same thing we do every night Tux. Try to take over the world!
That way, badly written code doesn't crash your browsers, but most importantly: you avoid those annoying popup windows on porn sites... :)
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
Refresh my memory; should it actually be able to get down to 25 magnitudes V filter? I thought Keck reached just a shade over 26, with almost an order greater collection area, among other things.
Well - despite their choice of asinh magnitude scheme, the quasar they found at z>5 had conventional V around 24.5 so I'll stand by my figure until someone pushes me off! Why they couldn't have used AB magnitudes like any reasonable person ... or maybe these asinh magnitudes are the same - they certainly sound similar (linear flux) but I'm about 1.5 years out of date now so I'm a little less certain.
I wonder if there was a particular choice to their section of the sky being surveyed, or if it was mainly observ/operational requirements.
My recollection is that this is an observational limitation - one telescope can see about half the 'sky' but you really only want to image stuff which is above you - as soon as you point more than 30' from straight up, the image quality goes down as you are looking through more of the atmosphere, and to my knowledge there are not adaptive optics on the SDSS imaging system.
Since you mentioned the significant additional work that could/may/will be done on these images, and the issues with their auto-processing, I wonder if they will also release raw(-er) data for better reduction, if nothing else. I can see plenty of potential shortcomings with their, in some areas, one-size-fits-all "pipelines." Seems like better, more frustrating by-hand work on many of these image strips will often be necessary. And massive deconvolution reps on terabytes of images...yum...and tedium...wow. And heck, people will be doing statistical surveys of these data for decades.
Definitely. I strongly hope that they release raw data (FITS format or whatever) - see my other post here for more discussion of things to do. On the other hand, a commercial entity like MS may be less interested in real science and more in disceminating pretty pictures...
If the raw data isn't forthcoming I would be very surprised though - once the initial 'safe' period is over so the professional astronomers can stake their claim to the best and latest data, it makes little sense to restrict the data. As Skyview proved, general access to lots of data is a good thing, whether you depend on the data for your next round of research funding or whether you are merely interested in a little home study.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
No good. Just try browsing http://www.research.microsoft.com/ with Netscape, and watch how fast it crashes. (Hint, it's the JavaScript.)
Turn off JavaScript and search for "astronomy" and you'll get the papers....
---
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
This means that, with just an Internet connection, I will be able to use the world's best telescopes and do my own research, maybe discover some celestial objects that have always been there but no one's had the (available telescope) time to look at/for them.
Doesn't the search for heavenly bodies require analysis over time, and not simply an image? I mean, for one thing, most of what we're discovering these days aren't visual elements anyway; they're things like extrasolar planets, quasars, and black holes, things that you can't really find with a visual survey of the sky. About the only real visual things you might spot are comets and/or asteroids, but detection of those bodies generally requires a bit more than simply a sky survey, and you'll still need photographs of that area over time.
Don't get me wrong, I think this a great idea. I just don't want to get amateur astronomers' hopes up. A map of the sky is great for learning, but one still needs the tools of the trade to do real research and discovery.
Everyone in favor of decreasing the gravitational constant, say Aye!
Scuttlemonkey is a troll
So bandwidth is not an issue, simply because the people setting up the projects are smart enough to know the extremity of their data and their bandwidth cap.
I'm actually pretty surprised that this got moderated up.
Have you ever looked through a real telescope? No, you don't see what the Hubble sees. Things are not in color (usually).
For the price of a brand new all-the-bells-and-whistles-included Linux box, you can get a top of the line amateur telescope. Yet you don't have to spend that much if you don't want to. But do get a good one and not some department store piece of crap. Celestron makes some of the best ones out there I think.
What you will see is so astounding you will never ever forget it. You are seeing it with your own eyes - not some camera. I still remember the first time I saw Saturn 22 years ago. It was and still is something to sit and stare at for hours.
Yeah, I take pictures with my scope, and I stick em up on the web, but well, they don't compare to really seeing something for yourself. I guess when it comes to this I am a Luddite.
I guess a good way to put it are the porno webcams. Sure, it is fun to watch, but nothing beats being there.
I do like the idea, don't get me wrong. But seriously, if you are the least bit interested in astronomy, do yourself a favor and buy a real telescope. The experience is worth it.
So if you really want the data and want to do meaningful data mining on it, I suggest you buy it on tape, and get them to snail mail it to you. Microsoft had better think carefully about what's doing to the rest of the net before it tries to offer the data to anyone who asks.
Well, could this be made into an app like SETI@Home? A nice distributed app that runs on all sorts of computers with some pretty screensaver (maybe of the current pics being processed) might be something people really like. Even just a catalogue would be pretty extensive. But if a whole lot of people each proccess one picture, it might be worth it.
There are possibly some applications that could be automated, such as building a complete two-point correlation function for the clustering of the objects in the field, or maybe trying to categorize all the objects by colour, redshift and position into groupings in space and colour. However, most of these tasks are doable in a reasonable amount of computing time - say two-weeks computation on an UltraSparc machine (although the two-point correlation function is an O(n^2) problem, that requires 10^16 comparisons at a rough estimate, with maybe 10^8 comparisons a second, that would require ... umm ... err ... about 3 years of CPU time). So yes - possibly an automated tool might well be worth it. I strongly suspect that few astronomers would bother to do the correlation function for the whole field at all scales, and would settle for looking at the function for scales up to around 4 degrees separation on the sky (that's much bigger than the largest known cluster of galaxies).
However, looking at the automatically processed picture strips, I see all sorts of problems with background level correction (the background appears to be wavey in these pictures so there is definitely room for improvement). Modern astronomical analysis often requires significant time spent on looking at a particular frame of interest - I spent over a year examining and refining an image of a pair of Quasars as part of my thesis - so my feeling is that there is much to be gained by picking an object which interests you, possibly from a Radio or X-ray survey, and following it up with the SDSS survey here. With this much data I think you can be assured that the Astronomy community will get to grips with the important statistical analysis on it's own. What it won't be able to do is follow up every field, every interesting quasar or galaxy and really really work on it. It may be possible to see gravitational lensing (although it won't be very clear since the point spread function will be around an arcsec) or do some funky image processing to try and deconvolve the images to recover more detail. In fact, there are lots of things to play with which are unlikely to ever get done on every part of this image data, so grab yourself a copy of IRAF or Source Extractor and go play.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
A microsoft story on slashdot that isn't just flamebait? What's the world coming to?
"Do you think we could wipe out world hunger forever if scientists figured out how to make AOL's Free CD's edible?"-
If you're not an astronomer, try out the non-astronomer page, pick your wavelengths, and browse around the sky. Hopefully NASA's servers can handle a Slashdotting.
--
I had to listen to over a decade's worth of SDSS telling the entire rest of astronomy to pack up
and go home, since they were gonna do it all. Nice to see they're finally doing something.
What burns me is that sessions devoted many hours to all the CS PhD theory talks during *astronomy*
sessions about all the details of how the data would be stored and made available.
Looks like when push came to shove they had to make a quick deal with Microsoft.
SDSS is not the first sky survey that is made available online, nor will they really ever be the
pioneer, except through revisionist history. I note that one of their press releases links to
a preprint from a week ago. They fit a spheroid model to the halo and come up with a flattening
parameter. Cool, I published my fit six years ago with the APS at Minnesota. Got the same
number. Actually, my statistics were better. Did I get the professional courtesy of a reference? No.
At least I credited those who determined this parameter before me.
The groundbreaking work in sky surveys was done by the APM in Cambridge, and others doing this
kind of work include SuperCosmos in Edinburgh, the APS in Minnesota, DPoss at Caltech, and the
digital sky survey at Space Telescope. Most have had their data online for ten years and have
papers on their results.
The more expensive a project, the higher the incentive to do science by press release.
I guess I just get pissed off when I see Sloan and Hubble take credit for something that has been
known for years merely by adding a pretty picture.
For those of you who don't keep tabs on every astronomical survey underway, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey covers a quarter of the entire sky down to fairly faint magnitudes - at a guess to about 25 magnitude in V (the faintest object you can see at night away from street lights is about 5th magnitude, and for every extra 2.5 magnitudes, the objects get 10 times fainter). While this data does not go as deep as the Hubble Deep Field, the sheer number of objects covered (and more than half of them will be galaxies, since the number of galaxies visible at these faint magnitudes is several factors more than the number of stars in our own galaxies) means that this data allows a far more thorough analysis of the clustering of galaxies in the universe around us. Since this survey is not just imaging these objects but is also measuring the spectra using a grism (basically a series of prisms arranged linearly across the field), you can extrapolate the position on the sky and obtain an estimate of distance from the redshift. So you can do some fairly heavy duty astronomy with this data once it gets released, and the sheer amount of information means that it will be many years before it is all properly worked through. Picking a particular area of sky for study will almost certainly yield something new.
Of course, you can just go window shopping through this data for pretty pictures. And there should be lots ...!
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
There is a similar service that has been in use for several years, the hubble data archive has hosted a _huge_ database of celestial objects with reasonable clarity and terriffic options for image format and size.