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It was suddenly possible to carry telescope data home immediately after an observing run, said Alice Shapley, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles who joined Steidel’s group as a graduate student in the late 1990s.īy the late 2000s, when I was a graduate student in astronomy working with Shapley, digital video discs (DVDs) were the preferred medium for transporting astronomical data. The palm-sized disks held far more data than 9-track tapes, and they weren’t nearly as cumbersome to transport. Get the most fascinating science news stories of the week in your inbox every Friday.Īround the time Steidel began advising graduate students of his own in the mid-1990s, technology had marched on, and magnetic cassette tapes were in use for data storage. Radio telescopes in Chile-part of the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA)-point toward the night sky. “A weeklong observing run would take about 24 of these, or two boxes, weighing about 40 pounds each.” The load was too bulky to bring with him on an airplane, however, so Steidel had to ship the tapes back to the United States via boat, a process that took several weeks. To transfer the astronomical data that he collected back to his home institution for analysis, Steidel recorded them onto dinner plate–sized magnetic storage tapes known as 9-track tapes.Įach observing run generated a lot of tapes to haul back to the United States, said Steidel. Steidel’s destination was Las Campanas Observatory, where he used a telescope to observe “quasi-stellar objects,” intensely bright and distant astronomical bodies believed to be powered by supermassive black holes. Between 19, he made four trips by himself to Chile.

That’s what Chuck Steidel, an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, remembers doing as a graduate student in the 1980s.

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Only a few decades ago, just about everyone engaged in professional observational astronomy would have traveled to a telescope to collect their own data. The challenge now is storing and organizing all of those data and making sure they’re accessible and useful to a wide variety of scientists around the world. And thanks to advances in detector technology, cosmic data are being collected more rapidly, and at a higher density, than ever before. With research-grade telescopes peppered across all seven continents- and also in space-there’s no shortage of astronomical data. In recent years, scientists have also probed the universe using gravitational waves-an advance made possible by exquisitely sensitive instrumentation. And rather than looking through an eyepiece, like astronomers of yore, researchers today collect an enormous array of observations across the electromagnetic spectrum, from X-rays to radio waves, using sophisticated digital detectors. Modern astronomy is most decidedly a team sport, with collaborations often spanning multiple institutions and particularly large scientific endeavors regularly producing papers with more than a hundred coauthors. Gone are the days of the lone astronomer holding court at the telescope. That embarrassment of riches has necessitated some serious data wrangling by myself and my colleagues, and it’s changing astronomical science forever. But the sheer quantity of data flowing from modern research telescopes, to say nothing of the promised deluges of upcoming astronomical surveys, is astounding even astronomers.

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Internet Explorer is not supported - we recommend Firefox or Chrome for Windows users.For scientists who study the cosmos, hard-to-grasp numbers are par for the course. The KOA web pages are supported under most common hardware platforms and operating systems, but on tablets such as iPads and Androids, features using mouse click-and-drag functionality are not available.

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(You will be notified via email when the download package is ready) List of Files (Allows you to select which files to download) It is most useful for moving object searches. (To retrieve public Keck Interferometer data, use the dedicated KI Search Form)Ĭoordinates or object name, to be resolved by NED first then SIMBAD.Įxamples: 'DQ Tau', '04h46m53.05s +17d00m00.2s Equ J2000', '182.24771 -17.86600 ga'

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