SDSS and NVO, bringing Astronomical data to the masses

Speaker: Wil O'Mullane

8th June 2005 , 1pm , Devonshire G21/G22 Conference Room

Abstract

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) is in its 5th year and will hopefully be extended for 3 more years. The SkyServer is a comprehensive website allowing access to the 1.6TB science database which describes over 230 million astronomical objects. An extensive outreach and education section guides students through some of the data and tools. Traffic has been steadily increasing on the site requiring new developments such as the CasJobs Batch system. The National Virtual Observatory (NVO) concerns itself with the accessibility of datasets such as that produced by SDSS, it is in its 4th year. NVO is involved in international standards for the accessing of such data. This allows the construction of tools which are less specific to a single data set and allow correlations between them to be studied. Both projects faced and continue to face interesting technical challenges. This talk will present some of the highlights and discuss the underlying technologies.