Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
Our village needs a new town hall. Because we're modern progressive thinkers, rather than build one, we've decided that we're going to divide the village into three teams, and then compete to see which team can build a town hall first. Each team will get a grant from tax-payers money to build their hall. Obviously this will give us the best and most efficient result.
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/