Bringing the Universe to Earth

4 December - Day 5 Outreach

The final day focused on various outreach projects. This included a review of two key projects from the International Year of Astronomy: the 365 days of astronomy podcast (which will now continue into 2010 and Around the World in 80 Telescopes; and a number of minor projects.

The final session saw some progress on the Buried Data project, a look at virtual worlds, such as second life, and an extensive tutorial on the Microsoft World Wide Telescope.

3 December - Day 4 Vizualisation

An impressive day saw a number of presentations and workshops on the visualisation of astronomy data in a range of applications.

First up was a look at the limitations of virtual observatories and where the problems lie in terms of discovering data. As the astronomical community sits on the edge of a vast stream of data it is apparent that the required dynamic diagnostic tools are still awaiting development to enable efficient data mining.

Next up was a presentation of Microsoft WorldWide Telescope. This tool has evolved rapidly in the past 18 months and is now a powerful tool to enable astronomers to visualise and mine data resources. It also contains a number of additional features that enable even the most novice astronomer to create and share tours of information.

Next was a review of the potential from tagging images using VAMP metadata (a particular favourite on this site). Hopefully the community will adopt this protocol and enable rapid searching and indexing images.

Finally there was a presentation of Google Sky Map on the Android mobile platform. This is fun application and it was interesting to hear the reasoning and logic behind the decisions that led to the development of the application.

The afternoon saw a series of unconference session including some programming 101 session, a discussion on semantics of archives, a review of robotic telescope technologies, and an detail discussion on how to optimise science return from transient events.

2 December - Day 3 Hack Day

In the course of the day a group of around 20 individuals put together the concept for a new web based application called Buried Data.

The concept is to encourage people to share scientific data that they simple don't have to process themselves and form new collaborations.

1 December - Day 2 Web-based Collaboration

Today was a really interesting day. The morning session saw four presentation on different web-based collaborative applications. Not necessarily aimed at the wider audience, they demonstrate the potential to bring together large volumes of data for collaborative science.

First up was Andy Lawrence from his bedside in Scotland looking to the future of the Virtual Observatory. Slowly but surely the astronomy community is putting in place rules and processes to enable rapid and easy sharing of data and information.

This was followed by two talks on radio astronomy projects - eVLBI and LOFAR The eVLBI project seeks to combine in real time data from radio observatories across Europe and Asia. Through a series of dedicated high speed network connections this currently generates around 8 Giga-bits per second of data. The process is still in testing but there is a live status website.

The final presentation, which triggered much discussion, focused on how scientific collaboration can be achieved within a community even when it seems contrary to instinct. The example cited was the human genome project where an agreement, known as the Bermuda Declaration, ensured that all data became immediately available. Another example cited was the work of Tim Gowers and the polymath project.

Subsequent discussion focused on whether it was possible in astronomy to evolve a forum whereby a challenging research could be addressed by anyone who has an interest in solving the problem and can bring new insight to a problem.

30 November - Day 1 Citizen Science

The first day of the .Astronomy conference focused on citizen science. Citizen science projects seek to engage large numbers of the general public in science activities such as tagging galaxy types.

The morning session saw some very cool presentations onGalaxyZoo, Pulse@Parkes and AstroWISE. It was really interesting to see how people are exploiting broad interest in education and general public to harness the power of collective thinking.

The afternoon discussed the wonders of the Python programming language

while several unconference groups discussed future possibilities for citizen science applications.

It was very encouraging to see groups of people come together from different backgrounds and plan how engage with the public in the future and exploit that vast amounts of data that will come online in the next few years.

Day 2 will look at web based research and how online tools can serve both the astronomy community and reawaken the desire to discover.

29 November

The 2009 .Astronomy in Leiden starts in just a few hours time. I will try, and post some update as we go along.
The homepage for the conference, including live video coverage, is at http://dotastronomy.com/