Stars, Interstellar Medium and the Galaxy Commons^™

The Meaning Of Dark, Light And Shadows: Inferences In Art, Materiality And Cultural Practices, Frank Prendergast

Book/Book Chapter

Our visual awareness relies on light acting on the eye to perceive materiality and colour. Medieval thought wrestled to articulate and comprehend its nature. The notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, for example, included his descriptions to define light and make comparisons so as to differentiate between light and shadow. His focus was on the illumination of surfaces from the perspective of a painter, seeing shadows as ‘the diminution of light by the intervention of an opaque body’ and ‘the counterpart of luminous rays’. In his mind, a shadow ‘stood between light and darkness’, with darkness being ‘the absence of light’. …

High-Speed Distributed Data Process Of Photometric Astronomical Data, Paul Doyle

Other

Since the 1970s the CCD has been the principle method of measuring flux to calculate the apparent magnitude of celestial objects within astronomical photometry. Each CCD image must be digitally cleaned and calibrated prior to its use. As data archives increase in size to Petabytes, the data processing challenge requires image processing techniques to continue to exceed the rate of data capture.

This paper describes NIMBUS, a rapidly scalable, failure resilient distributed network architecture capable of processing CCD image data at a rate of hundreds of Terabytes per day. NIMBUS is implemented using a decentralized web queue to control the …

Data Mining By Grid Computing In The Search For Extrasolar Planets, Oisin Creaner [Thesis]

Doctoral

A system is presented here to provide improved precision in ensemble differential photometry. This is achieved by using the power of grid computing to analyse astronomical catalogues. This produces new catalogues of optimised pointings for each star, which maximise the number and quality of reference stars available. Astronomical phenomena such as exoplanet transits and small-scale structure within quasars may be observed by means of millimagnitude photometric variability on the timescale of minutes to hours. Because of atmospheric distortion, ground-based observations of these phenomena require the use of differential photometry whereby the target is compared with one or more reference stars. …

Mayo Dark Skies Park: A Virtual Experience, Mayo Dark Skies Community Group, Frank Prendergast

Datasets

The Mayo Dark Skies Community Group, in collaboration with the Dublin Institution of Technology, is pleased to launch a digital virtual experience of the Mayo Dark Sky Park. Following its designation as an International Dark Sky Park (Gold Tier), it is now possible to experience a part of this magnificent and pristine skyscape on your computer. This has been made possible using open source software (Stellarium http://www.stellarium.org/) and a specially commissioned digital panorama of the horizon surrounding the Ballycroy National Park Visitor Centre.

Stellarium is an open source planetarium for your computer and shows a fully realistic …

Building A Scalable Global Data Processing Pipeline For Large Astronomical Photometric Datasets, Paul Doyle

Other

Astronomical photometry is the science of measuring the flux of a celestial object. Since its introduction, the CCD has been the principle method of measuring flux to calculate the apparent magnitude of an object. Each CCD image taken must go through a process of cleaning and calibration prior to its use. As the number of research telescopes increases the overall computing resources required for image processing also increases. Existing processing techniques are primarily sequential in nature, requiring increasingly powerful servers, faster disks and faster networks to process data. Existing High Performance Computing solutions involving high capacity data centres are complex …