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Sloan Digital Sky Survey
Swannie writes: "There's a story in today's Chicago Tribune about a joint project that Fermi Lab is taking on with Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. The goal is to produce a 3D map of the universe using a really big digital camera, and a really creative way to add "depth" to the image. The article has some decent technical details for a newspaper, including a pretty picture." Update: 03/12 15:44 GMT by M : The blurb is in error. A particular scientist from Rensselaer is mentioned in the article, but Rensselaer isn't part of the project as an institution.
I think it would be really cool if when they take all this data they are collecting, they produced a 3-d image of the COSMOS and a 3-d image of the cosmos with every star's location shifted to show its theoretical place today... or in the case of billion light year stars.... nothing if they are burned out by now.... that woould truly be an intersting map to look at :)
[Scientists] "Right, we'd like some funding to build a map of the universe"
[Investor] "Sounds good. How are you going to go about it?"
"Well, we are going to get a really big camera..."
"click......"
"It's hard to say why people should study astronomy," said Gunn. "But in the scheme of human intellect, it is important to know where we came from and what's likely to be in store for us."
Oh, you mean this is a $85 million Horoscope Machine....
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
I've been playing around with this prog, it has quite a big 3d map in it.
Howdy all. I've been following the project online for over a year. The cool part is that this is sort of a googlebot for the heavens. See: http://www.astronomy.com/content/dynamic/articles/ 000/000/000/502vwthx.asp
In fact, even if we had all the science needed to make the calculations and the equipment to do so, a true map is theoretically impossible, based on the Uncertainty Principle it is impossible to determine with 100% accuracy the state of even an atom, let alone a universe.
.. is the creative process behind projects of this magnitude. Where do people get these ideas? Is the scenario below how it happened?
- Hey, I just got this great idea!
- Uhu, what's that?
- Let's make a 3D map of the entire universe!
- Sounds cool, let's get some funding!
Or is it more like:
- Hmmm, this problem would be easily solved if we had a 3D map of the universe..
- Sounds cool, let's get some funding for that project!
Or the third alternative:
- Hmmm, we need some funding!
- Sounds cool, let's make a 3D map of the entire universe!
- Great, that will keep us running for a couple of years!
:)
Now the 2df galaxy cluster mapping project which are giving us maps of our galaxy's position out to about 1B light-years -- /that's/ interesting AND news. hell,
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
I can think of a good application for this data.
Why doesn't the SDSS code up a distributed program like SETI to help in the analyzation of all that data to find something unique or unknown. Convert the pictures to 2D FFT's and have a set of known astronomical element FFT's and then do constant comparisons against this set to see if there is anything "unknown". I'm sure it would be more complex than this, but this is how visual image recognition works so I assume it could be tailored for this application.
I would certainly download an run an application that looks for new things in astronomy. I'm sure others would as well. Somehow it's slightly less frivilous than what SETI is doing and we stand to gain more in a quicker amount of time.
That way, when we do actually find something that looks interesting SETI would know where to point that big antenna...
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95
Three dits, four dits, two dits, dah!
Radio, radio, rah rah rah!