How to Make the Dream Come True: The Astronomers' Data Manifesto

Astronomy is one of the most data-intensive of the sciences. Data technology is accelerating the quality and effectiveness of its research, and the rate of astronomical discovery is higher than ever. As a result, many view astronomy as being in a 'Golden Age', and projects such as the Virtual Observatory are amongst the most ambitious data projects in any field of science. But these powerful tools will be impotent unless the data on which they operate are of matching quality. Astronomy, like other fields of science, therefore needs to establish and agree on a set of guiding principles for the management of astronomical data. To focus this process, we are constructing a 'data manifesto', which proposes guidelines to maximise the rate and cost-effectiveness of scientific discovery.Comment: Submitted to Data Science Journal Presented at CODATA, Beijing, October 200

A database with enterprise application for mining astronomical data obtained by MOA : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of the Master of Information Science in Computer Science, Massey University at Albany, Auckland, New Zealand

The MOA (Microlensing Observations in Astrophysics) Project is one of a new generation of modern astronomy endeavours that generates huge volumes of data. These have enormous scientific data mining potential. However, it is common for astronomers to deal with millions and even billions of records. The challenge of how to manage these large data sets is an important case for researchers. A good database management system is vital for the research. With the modern observation equipments used, MOA suffers from the growing volume of the data and a database management solution is needed. This study analyzed the modern technology for database and enterprise application. After analysing the data mining requirements of MOA, a prototype data management system based on MVC pattern was developed. Furthermore, the application supports sharing MOA findings and scientific data on the Internet. It was tested on a 7GB subset of achieved MOA data set. After testing, it was found that the application could query data in an efficient time and support data mining

A Review of High School Level Astronomy Student Research Projects over the last two decades

Since the early 1990s with the arrival of a variety of new technologies, the capacity for authentic astronomical research at the high school level has skyrocketed. This potential, however, has not realized the bright-eyed hopes and dreams of the early pioneers who expected to revolutionise science education through the use of telescopes and other astronomical instrumentation in the classroom. In this paper, a general history and analysis of these attempts is presented. We define what we classify as an Astronomy Research in the Classroom (ARiC) project and note the major dimensions on which these projects differ before describing the 22 major student research projects active since the early 1990s. This is followed by a discussion of the major issues identified that affected the success of these projects and provide suggestions for similar attempts in the future.Comment: Accepted for Publication in PASA. 26 page

Grids and the Virtual Observatory

We consider several projects from astronomy that benefit from the Grid paradigm and associated technology, many of which involve either massive datasets or the federation of multiple datasets. We cover image computation (mosaicking, multi-wavelength images, and synoptic surveys); database computation (representation through XML, data mining, and visualization); and semantic interoperability (publishing, ontologies, directories, and service descriptions)