Related papers: The uniqueness of observatory publications
This paper describes the main characteristics of the Virtual Observatory as a research infrastructure in Astronomy, and identifies those fields in which it can be of help for the community of spectral stellar libraries.
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…
This paper presents results of a survey of authors of journal articles published over several decades in astronomy. The study focuses on determining the characteristics and accessibility of data behind papers, referring to the spectrum of…
The Jodcast (www.jodcast.net) is a twice-monthly astronomy podcast from The University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Observatory. In this paper I give the motivation and history of The Jodcast, as well as a description of The Jodcast's…
I give a brief history of astronomical observatories as an institution. This includes: 1) observatories in Islam; 2) China and India; 3) early European observatories; 4) the rise of national observatories; 5) private (amateur)…
We consider a model of the Universe in which the matter content is in the form of discrete islands, rather than a continuous fluid. In the appropriate limits the resulting large-scale dynamics approach those of a Friedmann-Robertson-Walker…
Astronomers are good at sharing data, but poorer at sharing knowledge. Almost all astronomical data ends up in open archives, and access to these is being simplified by the development of the global Virtual Observatory (VO). This is a great…
We present a summary of the major contributions to the Special Session on Data Management held at the IAU General Assembly in Prague in 2006. While recent years have seen enormous improvements in access to astronomical data, and the Virtual…
Since its inception in 1993, the ADS Abstract Service has become an indispensable research tool for astronomers and astrophysicists worldwide. In those seven years, much effort has been directed toward improving both the quantity and the…
Observational astrophysics uses sophisticated technology to collect and measure electromagnetic and other radiation from beyond the Earth. Modern observatories produce large, complex datasets and extracting the maximum possible information…
With the mainstream adoption of references to datasets in astronomical manuscripts, researchers today are able to provide direct links from their papers to the original data that were used in their study. Following a process similar to the…
The Astrophysics Data System (ADS) provides an extensive system of links between the literature and other on-line information. Recently, the journals of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and a group of NASA data centers have…
Geographical distributions, ages and sizes of astronomy-related organizations have been investigated from comprehensive and up-to-date samples extracted from the master files for StarGuides/StarWorlds. Results for professional institutions,…
The Smithsonian/NASA ADS Abstract Service contains a wealth of data for astronomers and librarians alike, yet the vast majority of usage consists of rudimentary searches. Hints on how to obtain more focused search results by using more of…
We present the site quality of the Zadko Observatory, focusing on the brightness of the sky and the effects of the weather on the efficiency of the Observatory. We discuss these effects and their consequences for the scientific goals of the…
In this paper we describe our efforts to bring scientific data into the digital library. This has required extension of the standard WWW, and also the extension of metadata standards far beyond the Dublin Core. Our system demonstrates this…
Information on archives from the 1950s of 15 astronomical observatories is provided beginning with a list of correspondence and other information related to astronomy of the Copenhagen University Observatory in the 1950s. The Appendix…
A co-authorship network of scientists at a university is an archetypical example of a complex evolving network. Collaborative R&D networks are self-organized products of partner choice between scientists. Modern science is, due to the…
The NASA Orbital Debris Observatory (NODO) astronomical survey uses a transit 3-m liquid mirror telescope to observe a strip of sky in 20 narrow-band filters. In this article, we analyze a subset of data from the 1996 observing season. The…
This article presents a survey of publication and citation statistics for 835 UK professional astronomers: the majority of academics and contract researchers within the UK astronomical community. I provide histograms of these bibliometrics…