Related papers: Thread Safe Astronomy
Over the next decade we will witness the development of a new infrastructure in support of data-intensive scientific research, which includes Astronomy. This new networked environment will offer both challenges and opportunities to our…
Popular accounts of exciting discoveries often draw students to physics and astronomy, but at the introductory level it is challenging to connect with these in a meaningful way. The use of real astronomical data in the classroom can help…
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…
An array of large observational programs using ground-based and space-borne telescopes is planned in the next decade. The forthcoming wide-field sky surveys are expected to deliver a sheer volume of data exceeding an exabyte. Processing the…
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…
The study explored the usage of astronomical observations for the identification and tracking of artificial satellites. Spacecraft streaks on astronomical images are a growing issue for the astronomical community. The increasing number of…
Adaptive Optics is a prime example of how progress in observational astronomy can be driven by technological developments. At many observatories it is now considered to be part of a standard instrumentation suite, enabling ground-based…
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…
Over the past decade, sky surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have proven the power of large data sets for answering fundamental astrophysical questions. This observational progress, based on a synergy of advances in telescope…
The Kepler spacecraft has collected data of high photometric precision and cadence almost continuously since operations began on 2009 May 2. Primarily designed to detect planetary transits and asteroseismological signals from solar-like…
From the moment astronomical observations are made the resulting data products begin to grow stale. Even if perfect binary copies are preserved through repeated timely migration to more robust storage media, data standards evolve and new…
Scientific research is a continuous process, and the speed of future progress can be estimated by the pace of finding explanations for previous research questions. In this observers based view of stellar pulsation and asteroseismology, we…
In the era of big data astronomy, next generation telescopes and large sky surveys produce data sets at the TB or even PB level. Due to their large data volumes, these astronomical data sets are extremely difficult to transfer and analyze…
The number of small satellites has grown dramatically in the past decade from tens of satellites per year in the mid-2010s to a projection of tens of thousands in orbit by the mid-2020s. This presents both problems and opportunities for…
The work of astronomers is getting more complex and advanced as the progress of computer development occurs. With improved computing capabilities and increased data flow, more sophisticated software is required in order to interpret, and…
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…
Data volumes from multiple sky surveys have grown from gigabytes into terabytes during the past decade, and will grow from terabytes into tens (or hundreds) of petabytes in the next decade. This exponential growth of new data both enables…
Astronomy has been an inherently visual area of science for millenia, yet a majority of its significant discoveries take place in wavelengths beyond human vision. There are many people, including those with low or no vision, who cannot…
As our capacity to study ever-expanding domains of our science has increased (including the time domain, non-electromagnetic phenomena, magnetized plasmas, and numerous sky surveys in multiple wavebands with broad spatial coverage and…
An automated, rapid classification of transient events detected in the modern synoptic sky surveys is essential for their scientific utility and effective follow-up using scarce resources. This presents some unusual challenges: the data are…