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. "
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 //
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[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.
Yeah! And no singing unless you've had years of voice lessons. And no dancing unless you've had training. And unless you've got at least a Master's Degree in English Lit, don't try writing anything. No playing chess unless you're a Grand Master.
And most of all, no playing around with computers and programming and stuff like that unless you've got an accredited Computer Science degree, darn it.
Sheesh.
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.
If MS has a TerraServer, Sun should have a SolariServer -- showing sunspots, prominences, etc.
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... ---
This is pretty rediculous. I am sure that Microsoft are diversifying into Skymapping because they are afraid that the DoJ is going to break them up.
/. thread to bash Microsoft to try and look cool.
Yep just get right out of OS's and Software and focus on the non-monopolized sphere of SkyMapping. Lots of money to be made there!
Some of these things MS does have nothing to do with how to extend windows to every desktop. Some of them are just pure Geek. Bill is a geek, even if he is a misguided geek. A lot of the MS employees are big geeks (especially the research guys). Give us all a break from trying to be the first one in a
forge
Meaning, what does a completely commercial company like Micro~1 hope to gain from setting up such a server ? Makes me wonder ...
A lot of experiance in setting up an extremely large web-based DB with a potentially large user base. I'm sure they'll be trying out new stuff, and it makes great PR to claim that Win2K can run all this stuff. Plus, it's just great PR in general.
The Theory of Relativity does not say anything about time travel, and about travelling faster than light it proves nothing, that's why it's called "theory".
General Relativity does say something about time travel - it says that it is theoretically possible. The most obvious method is using wormholes and time dilation, but you can also acheive a similar effect using a sufficiently large rotating cylindrical mass - a cosmic string comes to mind. The mass of the cylinder drags spacetime around itself so that the time axis is swapped with one of the spatial ones, and time travel becomes possible. Of course, this is incredibly dangerous, but possible in theory.
And tachyons aren't forbidden by relativity IIRC. At zero energy they have infinite velocity, and as they gain energy they slow down, asymptotically approaching the speed of light from the other side. A tachyon can never become a tardion and vice versa, but both can exist under relativity. Tachyons are probably going to be ruled out by quantum effects however - superstring theory is free from the need for them.
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
Einstein (and others) proved that time travel is an impossibility, and we can never travel faster than light.
Wrong. The Theory of Relativity does not say anything about time travel, and about travelling faster than light it proves nothing, that's why it's called "theory". It does explain macrocosmic events better than other theories, but that doesn't mean there won't be a better one eventually. In fact, it is totally unfit to explain microcosmic stuff.
(because we would explode, or something)
Nope. According to the theory of relativity, attaining the speed of light is not possible for an object with non-zero resting mass because it would require an infinite amount of energy.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
As for the rest of us, what's wrong with looking at pretty pictures that don't even show nude women?
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?
Given your astrology comment you must be trolling but what the hell....
The reason is called pure science. Research for the sake of research not for some tangible / marketable end. Sure astronomy may not affect your life right now but down the road, who knows.
Take say, Galvani, if he hadn't touched a frogs leg with a piece of metal and thought, "Cool the sucker jumped! I wonder why?" You would be scripting perl on an abacus. Astronomy may produce the basic research that will lead to any number of useful developments. See the warphole article from a few days back.
This has always been the problem with with pure research. No results, no funding, no funding, who knows what were missing.
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
If you do the rituals -- follow the scientific method, etc -- then you are a scientist. Without the rituals, you aren't one. It's not that scientists poo-poo amateur scientists -- that's fairly rare, in my experience. What scientists have little patience for is the way-too-common nutcases who construct elaborate buzzword-laden "theories" and expect to be taken seriously, and then scream about "elitism" when their "theories" get shredded.
Coming up with a theory does not make one a scientist.
"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." - Carl Sagan
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.