Related papers: Thread Safe Astronomy
Scientific discovery is mediated by ideas that, after being formulated in hypotheses, can be tested, validated, and quantified before they eventually lead to accepted concepts. Computer-mediated discovery in astrophysics is no exception,…
We discuss what hampers the rate of scientific progress in our exponentially growing world. The rapid increase in technologies leaves the growth of research result metrics far behind. The reason for this lies in the education of astronomers…
Despite centuries of close association, statistics and astronomy are surprisingly distant today. Most observational astronomical research relies on an inadequate toolbox of methodological tools. Yet the needs are substantial: astronomy…
As astronomy enters an era defined by global telescope networks, petabyte-scale surveys, and powerful computational tools, the longstanding goals of astronomy education, particularly introductory ``ASTRO101'', but equally encompassing both…
A concept of the ground-based optical astronomical observations efficiency is considered in this paper. We believe that a telescope efficiency can be increased by properly allocating observation tasks with respect to the current environment…
Almost 80 years have passed since Trumpler's analysis of the Galactic open cluster system laid one of the main foundations for understanding the nature and structure of the Milky Way. Since then, the open cluster system has been recognised…
The historical development of ground based astronomical telescopes leads us to expect that space-based astronomical telescopes will need to be operational for many decades. The exchange of scientific instruments in space will be a…
The contemporary astronomical instruments have been producing the unprecedented amount of data. The largest part of this "data avalanche" is being produced by deep all-sky surveys yielding terabytes of raw data per night. Such a great data…
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…
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…
The stellar astronomy has always been considered the fundamental source of knowledge about the basic building blocks of the universe - the stars. It has proved correctness of many physical theories - like e.g. the idea of nuclear fusion in…
Advances in astronomy are often enabled by adoption of new technology. In some instances this is where the technology has been invented specifically for astronomy, but more usually it is adopted from another scientific or industrial area of…
The time domain is under-exploited in an astrophysical context, because the large photographic plate collections are almost never consulted by young astronomers. This is a result of lack of education of the more recent generations of…
Astronomy relies heavily on time domain observations. To maximize the scientific yield of such observations, astronomers must carefully match the observational cadence to the phenomena of interest. This presents significant scheduling…
Astrophysics and cosmology are rich with data. The advent of wide-area digital cameras on large aperture telescopes has led to ever more ambitious surveys of the sky. Data volumes of entire surveys a decade ago can now be acquired in a…
Some 400 years after Galileo, modern telescopes have enabled humanity to "see" what the natural eye cannot. Astronomical images today contain information about incredibly large objects located across vast distances and reveal information…
Contemporary astronomy benefits of very large and rapidly growing amounts of data in all bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, from long-wavelength radio waves to high energy gamma-rays. Astronomers normally specialize in data taken in one…
Astronomical researchers often think of analysis and visualization as separate tasks. In the case of high-dimensional data sets, though, interactive exploratory data visualization can give far more insight than an approach where data…
All but a few digital computers used for scientific computations have supported floating-point and digital arithmetic of rather limited numerical precision. The underlying assumptions were that the systems being studied were basically…
For centuries, the rich nocturnal environment of the starry sky could be modelled only by analogue tools such as paper planispheres, atlases, globes and numerical tables. The immersive sky simulator of the twentieth century, the…