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. "
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.
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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.