Related papers: Once FITS, Always FITS? Astronomical Infrastructur…
Astronomy, as a field, has long encouraged the development of free, open digital infrastructure (e.g., National Research Council 2010, 2011). Examples range from simple scripts that enable individual scientific research, through software…
We investigate the performance of Apache Spark, a cluster computing framework, for analyzing data from future LSST-like galaxy surveys. Apache Spark attempts to address big data problems have hitherto proved successful in the industry, but…
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…
Over the past century, major advances in astronomy and astrophysics have been largely driven by improvements in instrumentation and data collection. With the amassing of high quality data from new telescopes, and especially with the advent…
In this paper we describe the main features of the software package named FITSH, intended to provide a standalone environment for analysis of data acquired by imaging astronomical detectors. The package provides utilities both for the full…
In an era where astronomical data is expanding at an unprecedented rate, the importance of data sharing and accessibility among astronomy archives cannot be overstated. Since the 1990s, an international partnership between the Space…
Eight years after the ADS first appeared the last decadal survey wrote: "NASA's initiative for the Astrophysics Data System has vastly increased the accessibility of the scientific literature for astronomers. NASA deserves credit for this…
In this paper we present a number of metrics for usage of the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS). Since the ADS is used by the entire astronomical community, these are indicative of how the astronomical literature is used. We will show…
The Starlink Hierarchical Data System has been a very successful niche astronomy file format and library for over 30 years. Development of the library was frozen ten years ago when funding for Starlink was stopped and almost no-one remains…
Recent and forthcoming advances in instrumentation, and giant new surveys, are creating astronomical data sets that are not amenable to the methods of analysis familiar to astronomers. Traditional methods are often inadequate not merely…
I describe a new, open-source astronomical image-fitting program called Imfit, specialized for galaxies but potentially useful for other sources, which is fast, flexible, and highly extensible. A key characteristic of the program is an…
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…
The increase of astronomical data produced by a new generation of observational tools poses the need to distribute data and to bring computation close to the data. Trying to answer this need, we set up a federated data and computing…
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…
Increasingly there is a need to develop astronomical visualisation and manipulations tools which allow viewers to interact with displayed data directly, in real time and across a range of platforms. In addition, increases in dynamic range…
Astronomy has a distinguished tradition of using technology to accelerate the quality and effectiveness of science, and data-intensive initiatives such as the Virtual Observatory lead the way amongst other fields of science. However,…
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…
Over the past decade, astronomers have been using an increasingly larger number of web-based applications and archives to conduct their research. However, despite the early success in creating links across projects and data centers, the…
In a series of three previous papers, formulation and specifics of the representation of World Coordinate Transformations in FITS data have been presented. This fourth paper deals with encoding time. Time on all scales and precisions known…
We review some aspects of the current state of data-intensive astronomy, its methods, and some outstanding data analysis challenges. Astronomy is at the forefront of "big data" science, with exponentially growing data volumes and data…