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Earth's Radio Telescopes Combining Forces
Slatterz writes "I own a basic 70mm telescope, which I'm sure Galileo would have given his right arm for in 1609. In fact, this year marks exactly 400 years since Galileo first pointed a telescope at the skies — discovering the moons of Jupiter and helping to prove that the universe doesn't revolve around us. As a mark of respect, the United Nations has declared 2009 the International Year of Astronomy. Official festivities kick off this week in Paris and, to help start the celebrations, 17 radio telescopes in Australia, Asia, Europe and the Americas will track three quasars using something called "real-time Very Long Baseline Interferometry" — basically creating hi-res images by combining their data to simulate a telescope as large as the Earth. Sounds cool."
This is called eVLBI, and it is now done routinely to, e.g., determine the Earth's rotation (UT1).
From a networking standpoint, one interesting thing is that eVLBI requires high bandwidth (1 Gbps is typical), but can tolerate fairly high loss rates (because the actual cross correlation coefficients are rarely as high as 10^-3). This makes it an excellent candidate for an Internet scavenger service, where packets are sent at "less than best effort," i.e., with the understanding that they can be dropped if there is any congestion at all, so that eVLBI can use all available bandwidth without choking out other uses. The same technology may prove to be very useful for P2P services.
While growing up, my father imparted something of a passion for astronomy, and I remember being thrilled by a glance through his homebrew Dobsonian reflector. However, light pollution really takes any wonder out of gazing up at the heavens with a naked eye. I've been to some fairly remote places on Earth, such as central Kazakhstan and Western Sahara, but even there local authorities have put up enough lighting to seriously dim the skies. I can't imagine how glorious things must have been a century ago.
It's a pity few even realize what a problem light pollution is. If you want to really appreciate the stars, consider looking at something like Bob Mizon's Light Pollution: Responses and Remedies . But in the face of apathy from officials, there's no much hope for improvement.
What strikes me as funny as if there was/is a God he must have a fantastically disgusting mean streak. Technically it was the Church under the Pope that like burned Gallelio right? The same Church who God supposedly told he would honor the decisions they make down here. So if the Pope condemned Gallelio to hell for telling the truth then he would be there being flayed constantly.
Of course there are other ways you can take that, but since we're talking 100% hypothetical BS I figured I'd be lazy and take the wordings at face value. Alternate beliefs and theories include bits like that "promise" being bullshit by the Church so they can keep power, or God telling lies to people down here and doing whatever He wants up there, etc etc.
Slightly less off topic though I've always wondered what past great scientists would do with modern technology. I blame Star Trek for putting the idea in my head, what with Data and his holodeck friends of Einstein, Freud, Edison and so forth. I wonder if in some cases if these "greats" are only great because they had primitive tools and were more adept at using those and would be considered mediocre if they had modern gear and knew how to use it.
After all, using an IR or Radio telescope is different than using an optical one.
Interesting.
They say:
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
While the resolution of a large array can be similar to one gigantic dish, this does not mean it is as sensitive. No matter how spread the array, it is (at best) only as sensitive as the sum of its individual elements. What is nice though is that as some sites rotate out of the array, others can be brought online, which allows for continuous monitoring of a single patch of space. Even a giant array in the desert like the VLA is not capable of performing this feat since it is still just one point as far as the planet is concerned.
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
But Englishman Thomas Harriot made the first drawing of the moon after looking through a telescope several months before Galileo, in July 1609. http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090114-first-moon-map.html