Related papers: Lessons Learned from Sloan Digital Sky Survey Oper…
Astronomy has been at the forefront of the development of the techniques and methodologies of data intensive science for over a decade with large sky surveys and distributed efforts such as the Virtual Observatory. However, it faces a new…
Astronomy and astrophysics are witnessing dramatic increases in data volume as detectors, telescopes and computers become ever more powerful. During the last decade, sky surveys across the electromagnetic spectrum have collected hundreds of…
Astronomy is entering an era of data-driven discovery, due in part to modern machine learning (ML) techniques enabling powerful new ways to interpret observations. This shift in our scientific approach requires us to consider whether we can…
With the volume and availability of astronomical data growing rapidly, astronomers will soon rely on the use of machine learning algorithms in their daily work. This proceeding aims to give an overview of what machine learning is and delve…
This theoretical paper introduces a new way to view and characterize teaching and learning astronomy. It describes a framework, based on results from empirical data, analyzed through standard qualitative research methodology, in which a…
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) started a new phase in August 2008, with new instrumentation and new surveys focused on Galactic structure and chemical evolution, measurements of the baryon oscillation feature in the clustering of…
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…
Infrastructures are not inherently durable or fragile, yet all are fragile over the long term. Durability requires care and maintenance of individual components and the links between them. Astronomy is an ideal domain in which to study…
When the first CubeSats were launched nearly two decades ago, few people believed that the miniature satellites would likely prove to be a useful scientific tool. Skeptics abounded. However, the last decade has seen the highly successful…
We present an algorithmic method for efficiently planning a long-term, large-scale multi-object spectroscopy program. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey V (SDSS-V) Focal Plane System performs multi-object spectroscopy using 500 robotic…
Looking ahead to the next decade and imagining the landscape of astronomy in 2020, it is clear that astronomical surveys, large and small, plus extensive follow-up projects, will be a great engine of progress in our profession. Surveys have…
The goal of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey is ``to map in detail one-quarter of the entire sky, determining the positions and absolute brightnesses of more than 100 million celestial objects''. The survey will be performed by taking…
We provide a brief, and inevitably incomplete overview of the use of Machine Learning (ML) and other AI methods in astronomy, astrophysics, and cosmology. Astronomy entered the big data era with the first digital sky surveys in the early…
This white paper offers cautionary observations about the planning and development of new, large radio astronomy instruments. Complexity is a strong cost driver so every effort should be made to assign differing science requirements to…
Machine learning has rapidly become a tool of choice for the astronomical community. It is being applied across a wide range of wavelengths and problems, from the classification of transients to neural network emulators of cosmological…
Numerical simulations play a key important role in modern cosmology. Examples are plenty including the cosmic web - large scale structure of the distribution of galaxies in space - which was first observed in N-body simulations and later…
The beginning of the 21st century marked the "modern era of galaxy surveys" in astronomy. Rapid innovation in observing technology, combined with the base built by galaxy catalogs and atlases dating back centuries, sparked an explosion of…
Wide-angle, moderately deep redshift surveys such as that conducted as part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) allow study of the relationship between the structural elements of the large-scale distribution of galaxies -- including…
All sciences, including astronomy, are now entering the era of information abundance. The exponentially increasing volume and complexity of modern data sets promises to transform the scientific practice, but also poses a number of common…
The analysis and an efficient scientific exploration of the Digital Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (DPOSS) represents a major technical challenge. The input data set consists of 3 Terabytes of pixel information, and contains a few billion…