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Variability in the sky has been known for centuries, even millennia, but our knowledge of it is very incomplete even at the bright end. Current technology makes it possible to built small, robotic optical instruments, to record images and…
Data analysis in space sciences has been performed exclusively visually for years, despite the fact that the largest amount of data belongs to non-visible portions of the electromagnetic spectrum. This, on the one hand, limits the study of…
Most scientific data will never be directly examined by scientists; rather it will be put into online databases where it will be analyzed and summarized by computer programs. Scientists increasingly see their instruments through online…
The next-generation astronomy archives will cover most of the universe at fine resolution in many wavelengths. One of the first of these projects, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) will create a 5-wavelength catalog over 10,000 square…
The recent explosion of recorded digital data and its processed derivatives threatens to overwhelm researchers when analysing their experimental data or when looking up data items in archives and file systems. While current hardware…
Since its inception in the early 2000, the Virtual Observatory (VO), developed as a collaboration of many national and international projects, has become a major factor in the discovery and dissemination of astronomical information…
Traditional analysis techniques may not be sufficient for astronomers to make the best use of the data sets that current and future instruments, such as the Square Kilometre Array and its Pathfinders, will produce. By utilizing the…
The days of the lone astronomer with his optical telescope and photographic plates are long gone: Astronomy in 2025 will not only be multi-wavelength, but multi-messenger, and dominated by huge data sets and matching data rates. Catalogues…
I review the status of science with wide field surveys. For many decades surveys have been the backbone of astronomy, and the main engine of discovery, as we have mapped the sky at every possible wavelength. Surveys are an efficient use of…
High-quality, usable, and effective software is essential for supporting astronomers in the discovery-focused tasks of data analysis and visualisation. As the volume, and perhaps more crucially, the velocity of astronomical data grows, the…
Observational astronomers survey the sky in great detail to gain a better understanding of many types of astronomical phenomena. In particular, the formation and evolution of galaxies, including our own, is a wide field of research. Three…
The Virtual Observatory (VO) will revolutionise the way we do Astronomy, by allowing easy access to all astronomical data and by making the handling and analysis of datasets at various locations across the globe much simpler and faster. I…
In this, the first in a series of three papers concerning the SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey (SSS), we give an introduction and user guide to the survey programme. We briefly describe other wide-field surveys and compare with our own. We give…
Large, high-resolution space-based imaging surveys produce a volume of data that is difficult to present to the public in a comprehensible way. While megapixel-sized images can still be printed out or downloaded via the World Wide Web, this…
In this review, we explore the historical development and future prospects of artificial intelligence (AI) and deep learning in astronomy. We trace the evolution of connectionism in astronomy through its three waves, from the early use of…
Galaxy clusters are spectacular. We provide a Google Earth compatible imagery for the deep co-added images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and make it a tool for examing galaxy clusters. More details about how to get it can be found from…
For most of its history, cosmology was a qualitatively constrained discourse on the universe, shaped by limited observational access and the absence of global dynamical laws. This situation has changed decisively in recent decades. Modern…
Astronomy is increasingly encountering two fundamental truths: (1) The field is faced with the task of extracting useful information from extremely large, complex, and high dimensional datasets; (2) The techniques of astroinformatics and…
Cosmology has come a long way from being based on a small number of observations to being a data-driven precision science. We discuss the questions "What is observable?", "What in the Universe is knowable?" and "What are the fundamental…
Astronomy, as many other scientific disciplines, is facing a true data deluge which is bound to change both the praxis and the methodology of every day research work. The emerging field of astroinformatics, while on the one end appears…