Australian Virtual Observatory

Over the last decade astronomy has changed into a data-rich, indeed a data-deluged discipline. To be able to manage, analyse and make sense of the large volumes of data now flowing from telescopes, some new thinking is needed. One concept that is being developed by a number of countries is that of the virtual observatory (VO). These pages are intended to explain the concept, provide some background information and act as a focus for people interested in developing an Australian virtual observatory.

There is a range of opinion on what a virtual observatory is.

• Some see it as a smart archive, able to pull out all the observations matching a query specified in scientific terms such as:

  find all spectroscopic observations with R>10,000 of quasars in catalog X between 2 and 5h of RA and redshift > 1.5

  Archives with this sort of capability are being developed already; SkyView, SIMBAD and NED are well known to most astronomers. But these are not the final word by any means. A more advanced archive, intended to allow more abstract queries like the one above is the Science Archive being developed for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

• Other people envision even more "smarts"; if the archive doesn't have any data matching your criteria, it will tell you so and recommend a list of telescopes that could make the observation you require. It may even be possible for small requests to be sent directly to the observing queue of robotic telescopes.
   
• Since the data is large, no one institution could house it all. This requires the VO's request processing software to be able to search globally. So a VO is an international cooperative undertaking, from the start.

Well that's all very exciting, but

background

Describes some of the consequences of going down the VO path, and surveys related efforts already under way in other disciplines.

plans

What we have on the agenda within Australia.

discussions

Position papers, and archived mailing lists.