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. "

Comments

Search for bodies

[Hrunting]

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.

Democratizing space?

[FigWig]

Everyone in favor of decreasing the gravitational constant, say Aye!

Re:Don't believe the hype

[Bearpaw]

There's this priesthood, you see, and they've put out a lot of hype about how only they can conduct the rituals....

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

Re:Slowing the Internet to a crawl

[kevlar]

No offense, but nobody downloads the entire database of any sky survey. Anything over a 100 MB is not accessible to the public. If this is like any other digital sky survey, then what they'll do is let people punch in coordinates and see that area of sky.

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.

Computers are cool, but....

[Randy Rathbun]

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.

Slowing the Internet to a crawl

[(void*)]

The SDSS has not finished its survey of the sky yet. They have so far collected only about 5% of the sky that they are planning to image. Already, the processed volume of data runs into 2-3 TBs. And there is additional work to do. My friend, who works on it tells me that he has a hard time pulling the huge datasets around on 100M Ethernet. Complete downloads from one machine to another takes hours. If thousands of enthusiasts around the world are going to trying to download all of this data, you are going to run into deep trouble. As it is bandwidth is a precious resource.

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.

Re:State of the art survey

[tjwhaynes]

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

I can't believe this

[sstrick]

A microsoft story on slashdot that isn't just flamebait? What's the world coming to?

SkyView?

[sterwill]

So Microsoft is replicating SkyView? SkyView is very cool; beside the HTML forms-based access, they even have Java and X Window clients.

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.

--

SDSS (shhhhhh -- it's overrated!)

[pholus]

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.

State of the art survey

[tjwhaynes]

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

images already available

[rwade]

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.