Related papers: A Modest Proposal for the Astronomical Community
Time-to-science is an important figure of merit for digital instrumentation serving the astronomical community. A digital signal processing (DSP) community is forming that uses shared hardware development, signal processing libraries, and…
Scientific discussions of the arrow of time often get quite confusing due to highly complex systems they deal with. Popular literature then often coveys messages that tend to get lost in translation. The purpose of this note is to demystify…
Stereoscopic visualization is seldom used in Astrophysical publications and presentations compared to other scientific fields, e.g., Biochemistry, where it has been recognized as a valuable tool for decades. We put forth the view that…
The Gaia archive is being designed and implemented by the DPAC Consortium. The purpose of the archive is to maximize the scientific exploitation of the Gaia data by the astronomical community. Thus, it is crucial to gather and discuss with…
Progress is being made in code discoverability and preservation, but as discussed at ADASS XXI, many codes still remain hidden from public view. With the Astrophysics Source Code Library (ASCL) now indexed by the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data…
HEALPix -- the Hierarchical Equal Area iso-Latitude Pixelization -- is a versatile data structure with an associated library of computational algorithms and visualization software that supports fast scientific applications executable…
We present a machine learning based information retrieval system for astronomical observatories that tries to address user defined queries related to an instrument. In the modern instrumentation scenario where heterogeneous systems and…
We introduce a new, open-source, Python module for the acquisition and processing of archival data from many X-ray telescopes - Democratising Archival X-ray Astronomy (hereafter referred to as DAXA). Our software is built to increase access…
The National Academy of Science Astronomy and Astrophysics Survey Committee, in its new Decadal survey entitled Astronomy and Astrophysics in the New Millennium, recommends, as a first priority, the establishment of a National Virtual…
Many macroscopic physical processes are known to occur in a time-directed way despite the apparent time-symmetry of the known fundamental laws. A popular explanation is to postulate an unimaginably atypical state for the early universe -- a…
We present a World-Wide-Web-accessible database of astronomical images which suffer from a variety of observational problems, ranging from common occurences, such as dust grains on filters and/or the dewar window, to more exotic phenomena,…
The "search for extraterrestrial intelligence" (SETI) commensal surveys aim to scan the sky to find possible technosignatures from the extraterrestrial intelligence (ETI). The mitigation of radio frequency interference (RFI) is an important…
Several stellar systems (white dwarfs, red giants, horizontal branch stars and possibly the neutron star in the supernova remnant Cassiopeia A) show a mild preference for a non-standard cooling mechanism when compared with theoretical…
This paper explores the potential for strategic synergies between the JWST and the Ariel telescopes, two flagship observatories poised to revolutionise the study of exoplanet atmospheres. Both telescopes have the potential to address common…
In this note I argue that a version of complementarity is possible which evades the need for the "firewalls" recently proposed by Almheiri, Marolf, Polchinski, and Sully to burn up observers falling into black hole horizons. In particular I…
Remote observing seeks to simulate the presence of the astronomer at the telescope. While this is useful, and necessary in some circumstances, simulation is not reality. The drive to abstract the astronomer from the instrument can have…
This paper proposes a framework for scheduling the observation and download tasks of multiple agile satellites with practical considerations such as attitude transition time, onboard data capacity, and stereoscopic image acquisition. A…
Using new cosmological models for galaxy evolution, predictions for the next generation of deep mid-IR surveys are presented for both the ASTRO-F space telescope (due for launch 2003) and the proposed HII/L2 mission (2010). Although ASTRO-F…
Libpsht (or "library for Performant Spherical Harmonic Transforms") is a collection of algorithms for efficient conversion between spatial-domain and spectral-domain representations of data defined on the sphere. The package supports…
Despite their near dominance, heuristic state search planners still lag behind disjunctive planners in the generation of parallel plans in classical planning. The reason is that directly searching for parallel solutions in state space…