The world-wide telescope

ABSTRACT

Mining vast databases of astronomical data, this new online way to see the global structure of the universe promises to be not only a wonderful virtual telescope but an archetype for the evolution of computational science.

REFERENCES

• 1: Becker, R., Helfand, D., White, R., Gregg, M., and Laurent-Muehleisen, S. Faint Images of the Radio Sky at 20 Centimeters (FIRST); see sundog.stsci.edu.
• 2: Brunner, R., Ed. Virtual Observatories of the Future. Astronomical Society of the Pacific, San Francisco, CA, 2001; see www.voforum.org/.
• 3: Connolly, A., Genovese, C., Moore, A., Nichol, R., Schneider, J., and Wasserman, L. Fast algorithms and efficient statistics: Density estimation in large astronomical data sets. Astronom. J. (2002).
• 4: Gray, J., Slutz, D., Szalay, A., Thakar, A., van den Berg, J., Kunszt, P., and Stoughton, C. Data Mining the SDSS SkyServer Database. Tech. Rep. MSR-TR-2002-01, Microsoft, Redmond, WA, Jan. 2002.
• 5: Hanisch, R. et al. Definition of the Flexible Image Transport System (FITS). NOST 100-2.0. NASA/Science Office of Standards and Technology, Code 633.2, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, Mar. 29, 1999; see archive.stsci.edu/fits/fits_standard/.
• 6: Murray, S., Eichhorn, G., Kurtz, M., Accomazzi, A., Stern Grant, C., Bohlen, E., and Thompson, D. Astrophysics Data System (ADS). NASA and Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; see adswww.harvard.edu.
• 7: NASA. NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED). Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA; see nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/.
• 8: Ochsenbein, F., Bauer, P., and Marcout, J. The VizieR database of astronomical catalogues. J. Astron. Astrophys., Suppl. Ser. 143, 221 (2000); see also SIMBAD Astronomical Database simbad.u-strasbg.fr/.
• 9: Skrutskie, M. et al. 2 Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS); see pegasus.phast.umass.edu.
• 10: Alexander S. Szalay , Jim Gray , Ani R. Thakar , Peter Z. Kunszt , Tanu Malik , Jordan Raddick , Christopher Stoughton , Jan vandenBerg, The SDSS skyserver: public access to the sloan digital sky server data, Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data, June 03-06, 2002, Madison, Wisconsin [doi>10.1145/564691.564758]
• 11: Szapudi, I. et al. Estimation of correlations in large samples. In Proceedings of MPA/MPE/ESO Conference (Mining the Sky), A. Banday, S. Zaroubi, and M. Bartelman, Eds. Springer-Verlag, New York, 2001, 249--255.
• 12: York, D. et al. The Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Technical summary. Astronom. J. 120 (Sept. 2000), 1579--1587.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  J. Computer Applications
  J.2 PHYSICAL SCIENCES AND ENGINEERING

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.2 DATABASE MANAGEMENT
      H.2.0 General
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.3 COMPUTER GRAPHICS
      I.3.2 Graphics Systems

  K. Computing Milieux
  K.3 COMPUTERS AND EDUCATION
      K.3.0 General