Related papers: A Modest Proposal for the Astronomical Community
The naming of astronomical objects has represented among the most significant challenges in the record-keeping of the field since the very beginning. Long and unwieldy coordinate names, uninformative and ambiguous internal names, and the…
We introduce \emph{Astronomy and Computing}, a new journal for the growing population of people working in the domain where astronomy overlaps with computer science and information technology. The journal aims to provide a new communication…
Radio astronomical observations have very poor signal to noise ratios, unlike in other disciplines. On the other hand, it is possible to observe the object of interest for long time intervals as well as using a wider bandwidth.…
The Astropy Project (http://astropy.org) is, in its own words, "a community effort to develop a single core package for Astronomy in Python and foster interoperability between Python astronomy packages." For five years this project has been…
Astronomical software is now a fact of daily life for all hands-on members of our community. Purpose-built software for data reduction and modeling tasks becomes ever more critical as we handle larger amounts of data and simulations.…
The procedure that is currently employed to allocate time on telescopes is horribly onerous on those unfortunate astronomers who serve on the committees that administer the process, and is in danger of complete collapse as the number of…
I review some of the past and current methods for retrieval of literature and other published information, excluding commercial services. Much of this is a personal view and based on experience made at various institutions, some of them…
Despite all its well-known flaws and calls for its dismissal, the notorious $h$-index is still used in many instances when awarding grants, or promoting and hiring scientists. To address this, I set out to devise a better index, with the…
We performed a statistical analysis of the astrometric errors for the major asteroid surveys. We analyzed the astrometric residuals as a function of observation epoch, observed brightness and rate of motion, finding that astrometric errors…
Over the past decades and even centuries, the astronomical community has accumulated a signif-icant heritage of recorded observations of a great many astronomical objects. Those records con-tain irreplaceable information about long-term…
Threshold fully homomorphic encryption (ThFHE) enables multiple parties to compute functions over their sensitive data without leaking data privacy. Most of existing ThFHE schemes are restricted to full threshold and require the…
Access to astronomical data through archives and VO is essential but does not solve all problems. Availability of appropriate software for analyzing the data is often equally important for the efficiency with which a researcher can publish…
A common flaw of astronomers is to believe that they know the truth even when data is scarce. I provide ten examples where this approach led to wrong strategic decisions in research plans, causing unnecessary delays in finding the truth. In…
With SKA precursor and pathfinder operations in full swing, radio and (sub-)mm astronomy is entering the era of super big data. The big questions is how to make (sub-)mm and radio data available to the astronomical community, preferably…
Astronomical observation data require long-term preservation, and the rapid accumulation of observation data makes it necessary to consider the cost of long-term archive storage. In addition to low-speed disk-based online storage, optical…
We present a bibliographic analysis of Chandra, Hubble, and Spitzer publications. We find (a) archival data are used in >60% of the publication output and (b) archives for these missions enable a much broader set of institutions and…
The astronomical community is grappling with the increasing volume and complexity of data produced by modern telescopes, due to difficulties in reducing, accessing, analyzing, and combining archives of data. To address this challenge, we…
ASTRO-H White Papers are meant to provide useful information to scientists who plan observations from the satellite. This short paper introduces the 16 ASTRO-H White Papers in addition to general description of the satellite and its new…
One of the Birds of a Feather (BoF) discussion sessions at ADASS XX considered whether a new journal is needed to serve the astronomical computing community. In this paper we discuss the nature and requirements of that community, outline…
Astronomy is entering a new era as multiple, large area, digital sky surveys are in production. The resulting datasets are truly remarkable in their own right; however, a revolutionary step arises in the aggregation of complimentary…