Twitter, AstroTwitter, and SkyAlert

There has been a great deal of interest lately about astronomy and the new media. Internet technologies and modes of communication, including blogging, twitter, facebook, and even virtual worlds such as second life are becoming avenues for interactions between professional astronomers and space scientists and the larger public. (NASA’s martian rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have over 16,000 followers on twitter!) This topic was a focus of a recent episode of Astronomy Cast, and there are even conferences dedicated to the topic such as .Astronomy | Networked Astronomy and the New Media where a number of the talks from last year’s conference are available for online viewing via streaming video. These efforts take on deeper significance as we enter the coming age of survey astronomy with open access to data archives and opportunities for citizen scientists of varied backgrounds to become part of the process of scientific discovery via direct collaborations. GalaxyZoo is certainly one of the most successful recent endeavors along these lines. It leverages survey data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey by enlisting the help of thousands of individuals in an effort to classify galaxies to better understand galaxy evolution, discover new types of objects, and address deeper cosmological questions about the large-scale structure of the Universe.

New modes of communication are also in the works. AstroTwitter, is one such proposal under development of Dr. Stuart Lowe at the Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics. As Lowe describes it, AstroTwitter aims “to make it easy for both professional and amateur telescopes to let the world know what they are observing in real-time.” By being a twitter-like service dedicated to Astronomy, AstroTwitter will overcome some of the inherent limitations of Twitter by providing specialized output formats (Webpages, XML, Google Sky overlays, and VOEvents, for example.)

With new synoptic survey telescopes due to come online in the coming years, the problem of disseminating information about significant events to the public, scientists, or other robotic instruments becomes a growing concern. SkyAlert aims to address this growing need. One of the key complaints about twitter is that there is no discrimination. So yes, I might be interested in the doings of a particular person (or robotic spacecraft!), but there is no other way to filter the content received. The goal of SkyAlert is to create a general subscription-based service that allows users to define constraints on the events of interest. An example from paper Skyalert: Real-time Astronomy for You and Your Robots: I want Catalina transient events where the Catalina measurement is at least 2 magnitudes brighter than that from the Sloan survey. Each event would have a wiki-based web-page with additional supporting data and allow users to add comments or other annotations.

From Williams, et al. 2008. SkyAlert: Real-time Astronomy for You and Your Robots

Welcome to the New Media…get your telescopes and IPhones ready!

LSST and Pan-STARRS

It was announced yesterday that the LSST’s giant 8.4 primary mirror blank (molded together with its 5.0 meter tertiary mirror blank) emerged from 3 months in a furnace in ‘perfect’ condition. The LSST, or Large Synoptic Survey Telescope is an amazing $200 million effort to create the largest, fastest deep-sky imager in the world.  Planned for construction in Chile, and due to come online in 2015, this remarkable instrument will generate an estimated 30 terabytes of data per night, and over seven petabytes of imaging and catalog data over the course of a year.   Using a 3.2-gigapixel camera, the telescope will be able to survey down to the 24th magnitude in 10 seconds, for surpassing by an order of magnitude the capabilities of existing surveys.  The planned data throughput of the LSST is truly breathtaking and opens up unique challenges for database design, critical to enable down-stream analysis and data-mining.   (See in particular, Becla et al., 2006.)

The LSST.
Image source: http://www.lsst.org/Images/lsst_images.shtml

The LSST has been in the works for many years.   A 2004 Science magazine news focus article that I came across recently while researching the history of the LSST discusses competing attempts such as Pan-STARRS to achieve many of the same scientific aims using multiple smaller telescopes.   As described in the article, the advantage of the Pan-STARRS approach is that the smaller telescopes (figure below) can be constructed more quickly using existing technologies, while introducing certain software challenges with interconnecting multiple detectors.

Pan-STARRS
Image source: http://pan-starrs.ifa.hawaii.edu/public/project-status/gallery.html

It seems that the Pan-STARRS approach may have a rather substantial leg up, having already completed construction and achieved first-light over a year ago on PS1 – a prototype observatory that will constitute 1/4th of the complete Pan-STARRS system.   By comparison, the LSST mirrors should be ready by 2012 with scientific operations in full-swing by 2015.   I expect in the end, both initiatives will be enormously valuable and fundamentally change the depth and breadth of our understanding of our dynamic solar system, the Milky Way galaxy, and the Universe.