In the 16th century, when Galileo shook the world with his astronomical observations, all it took was a couple of brass tubes and a few glass lenses.
Discoveries are now made with huge, multimillion-dollar telescopes perched on remote mountaintops, far from the light pollution of major cities. Observation time is precious and usually booked months or years in advance. Most astronomers stare not at the night sky but at computer monitors. They see their observations as numbers plotted on charts and graphs and sometimes reconstructed as brilliant, multicolor images.
For the last 10 years, Thomas McGlynn, a senior researcher at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center has been forging a new way to do astronomy research with the SkyView Virtual Telescope.
At this point, most of the data collected is scattered around the country on any number of computer systems connected to the individual telescopes and research projects, McGlynn said. SkyView is collecting data in different wavelengths of light and radio waves, and providing a way for researchers around the world to view the information.
"SkyView is designed to make it easier for radio astronomers to get optical data, or X-ray astronomers to retrieve infrared data," McGlynn said. Researchers can see changes over time or view the same distant objects in a variety of forms, revealing details and structures that are not apparent from a single view. By combining many image files, the virtual observatory can build "mosaic" maps that show large areas of the night sky at a level of detail that is impossible with wide-angle views.
"SkyView is the only place where data from all wavelengths are available to the public," McGlynn said. "It's a unifying view of the universe that we just don't have anywhere else right now.
"During the last few years, the concept of the virtual observatory has taken hold," he added.
Breakthroughs in telescope, detector and computer technology allow astronomical surveys to produce terabytes of images and to share them over the Internet. Lynn Cominsky, professor of physics and astronomy at Sonoma State University, said the National Science Foundation has committed about $70 million to the National Virtual Observatory to make the information from the large optical telescopes easily available.
"The idea that people would try to collect optical visible light data that, right now, is just sitting on someone's shelf or isn't being saved in any kind of standardized form and put them into a big database -- that's a new idea," Cominsky said. "Then you don't have to go out and get your own telescope time all the time, and if you wanted to do a historical study of some kind you would have access to this.
"People are paying a lot of money to go and collect that data and, if the government has an investment in that, they should be able to have a way that other people can access it," she added. Virtual observatories like SkyView offer "a way that people can do a lot of studies that aren't otherwise possible."
Along with the ability to see large amounts of data and pictures from telescopes in different parts of the world, the virtual observatories are opening up the field to amateur astronomers and even elementary and high school students. McGlynn said about one-third of the requests coming into SkyView these days are from nonprofessionals.
"SkyView is one of the very few places where nonastronomers can easily get radio, infrared or high-energy data," he said.
