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Register a new userThe Future of astronomical archives: reaching out to and engaging broader communities
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The importance of archival science increases significantly for astrophysical observatories as they mature and their archive holdings grow in size and complexity. Further enhancing the science return of archival data requires engaging a larger audience than the mission reference community, mostly because of the growth of interest in multi-wavelength and transient/time variability research. Such a goal, though, can be difficult to achieve. In this paper I will describe a different approach to this question that, while minimizing technological friction and leveraging existing services, makes archival observations more accessible and increases our capability to proactively engage astronomers on potentially interesting archival records. Inspired by this strategy, the Chandra Data Archive team is working on two specific experimental projects that will hopefully demonstrate their potential while contributing to the maximization of the scientific return of the Chandra mission.
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In this article I present IEAD, a new interface for astronomical science databases. It is based on a powerful, yet simple, syntax designed to completely abstract the user from the structure of the underlying database. The programming language chosen for its implementation, JavaScript, makes it possible to interact directly with the user and to provide real-time information on the parsing process, error messages, and the name resolution of targets; additionally, the same parsing engine is used for context-sensitive autocompletion. Ultimately, this product should significantly simplify the use of astronomical archives, inspire more advanced uses of them, and allow the user to focus on what scientific research to perform, instead of on how to instruct the computer to do it.
The future of astronomy is inextricably entwined with the care and feeding of astronomical data products. Community standards such as FITS and NDF have been instrumental in the success of numerous astronomy projects. Their very success challenges us to entertain pragmatic strategies to adapt and evolve the standards to meet the aggressive data-handling requirements of facilities now being designed and built. We discuss characteristics that have made standards successful in the past, as well as desirable features for the future, and an open discussion follows.
In this article we wonder what the next 100 years will bring for women in astronomy in the UK. After this year of looking back and celebrating 100 years of women in the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS), we now ask: what might the future hold? Extrapolating current trends, when might we expect equality in the genders of RAS members, speakers at meetings, award winners and more? Ultimately, when might we stop needing to talk about women in astronomy at all - when it will be as irrelevant to the conversation about astronomy as being a male astronomer is?
The U.S. Virtual Astronomical Observatory was a software infrastructure and development project designed both to begin the establishment of an operational Virtual Observatory (VO) and to provide the U.S. coordination with the international VO effort. The concept of the VO is to provide the means by which an astronomer is able to discover, access, and process data seamlessly, regardless of its physical location. This paper describes the origins of the VAO, including the predecessor efforts within the U.S. National Virtual Observatory, and summarizes its main accomplishments. These accomplishments include the development of both scripting toolkits that allow scientists to incorporate VO data directly into their reduction and analysis environments and high-level science applications for data discovery, integration, analysis, and catalog cross-comparison. Working with the international community, and based on the experience from the software development, the VAO was a major contributor to international standards within the International Virtual Observatory Alliance. The VAO also demonstrated how an operational virtual observatory could be deployed, providing a robust operational environment in which VO services worldwide were routinely checked for aliveness and compliance with international standards. Finally, the VAO engaged in community outreach, developing a comprehensive web site with on-line tutorials, announcements, links to both U.S. and internationally developed tools and services, and exhibits and hands-on training .... All digital products of the VAO Project, including software, documentation, and tutorials, are stored in a repository for community access. The enduring legacy of the VAO is an increasing expectation that new telescopes and facilities incorporate VO capabilities during the design of their data management systems.
This white paper advocates for the creation of a community-wide program to maintain precise mid-transit times of exoplanets that would likely be targeted by future platforms. Given the sheer number of targets that will require careful monitoring between now and the launch of the next generation of exoplanet characterization missions, this network will initially be devised as a citizen science project -- focused on the numerous amateur astronomers, small universities and community colleges and high schools that have access to modest sized telescopes and off-the-shelf CCDs.
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