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Virtual Astronomy
DarkKnightRadick writes: "In this day and age, data sharing, data mining and distributed computing are words most of us know well enough, but until recently, those phrases were connected with such projects as DNET, and more recently with SETI@Home. Now we should all welcome the newcomer, Virtual Astronomy. With the framework being developed by three different groups (one in the UK, one in the US, and one in Australia), one would expect this to be a very competitive field, but alas, this is not the case. The three groups are working together so that they can have it all up in running the in the projected 15 years that it will take to put all this data into an electronic format."
The paper and more can be found here
The goal of this project isn't to recreate SETI@Home but to give astronomers all over the place access to data collected by instruments in places where they aren't. We've got thousands of instruments gulping down data but most of it doesn't ever get processed, just stored for later. Like the article says, anybody can have access to massive amounts of raw data. A grad student in the UK can download data gathered from telescopes in Hawai'i and write his or her own program to process them looking for the data they want. A group of amateur astronomers could request a bunch of wide field images and scavange through them looking for comets or asteroids.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
If you want facts, as opposed to fiction, see the current NASA launch forecast.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Works even better if you run Linux and can get IRAS running and have a good display, especially if you want to fool around with the Hubble archives. Professional astronomers have been doing their research on unixes for 20 plus years. Tools are available for the asking and most professionals and grad students are willing to help out an amateur who is serious. Linux brings, to an amateur, the same desktop power, but at a very low cost.
Astronomy is one of the few hard sciences where an amateur can contribute serious work, either with nothing more than a telescope and a webcam to digging into the very numerous digital archives that are available for free.
And to add to that, there is a long, long, tradition of amateurs and professional astronomers working together. For a great example see theAmerican Assoc. of Variable Star Observers.
Most posters here haven't seem to have grasped the fact that these projects aren't dealing with letting the public access data in a Seti@home manner. That's not the aim at all. What they're trying to do is consolidate all the data that they do have available, and make that accessible to researchers. That way, you don't have to bid for expensive telescope time, you just make a requisition for the data, which would just get squirted at you over the net.
Want a particular portion of the sky at a particular wavelength? Just check the database for it. Simple as that. With the amount of machine-controlled telescopes and the new arrays developed, sucking in all this data, managing it, consolidating it and allowing people to access it in an easy way is a great move forward.
http://danhon.com/
From their web pages:
I have the feeling that some may be confused about what virtual astronomy is. So perhaps I can try to clear up a little bit.
Much of astronomy now is done by individual astronomers going to telescopes and pointing to interesting objects in the sky. Each researcher has lists of several objects they'd like to observe, and on their night at the telescope, they skip from object to object. This is good for the individual astronomer, but unfortunately, wastes a lot of time, because a lot of the time must be spent on finding the object, moving the telescope, etc. Because observing time is so precious, a new way has been discovered to make it more efficient -- virtual observing.
Virtual observing mas made possible by the great advances in database technology and hardware storage technology. It works by having a telescope (which used to be used by astronomers for individual objects, for example) survey broad areas of sky, subsequently storing that data on disk. Efficiency is increased, because you essentially put the telescope in one position and let the sky move over it, instead of having to point from object to object. Also, setting the telescope up for one survey run is much better than setting it up for the 2 or 3 observers each night, who may have different requirements.
Then, when an "observer" wants to look at an object, instead of asking the telescope to point there specially for him/her, now he/she just goes to the database and retrieves the image. It's better for the astronomer too -- quicker, no need to wait for a clear night, or your time to observer, and no need to fly out to the observatory. There are also lots of gains to be had in the science, too, because some experiments require large swaths of continuous sky to analyze, instead of just individual objects. Much of the work demonstrating the expansion of the universe relies on having such data, and it's only been possible recently with the first virtual observing projects.
The challenges are, as stated in previous posts, compiling all the data so that it can be accessible in an easy way by observers around the world, storage, and data processing. It's going to be an exciting time for astronomy, and I think that our knowledge is going to increase rapidly!