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S C I E N C E &
T E C H N O L O G Y
Taming the Terabyte
Making Star Gazing Remotely Possible
At the Apache Point Observatory, a few yards away from the Sloan
Digital Sky Survey instrumentation, sits a more conventional, 3.5
meter telescope, which Hopkins astronomer Alan Uomoto plans to
use to study faint, cold stars called M stars. The fainter the
star, of course, the smaller it is. But at some point, a star
cannot get any fainter (smaller), or it is no longer a star, says
Uomoto. He would like to find this limit to a star's faintness.
The Apache Point telescope, he says, "has unique capabilities. In
principle, one could run the whole thing remotely." Astronomers
should be able to send commands through the Internet that would
tell the telescope to reposition itself. "We would have all the
convenience of being at the observatory while being in
Baltimore," says Uomoto. "That would be great. Except it turns
out the Internet is not fast enough. Now it takes many, many
minutes to download a picture." In the meantime, the position of
the sky shifts, and the astronomers lose their original
field-of-view. "With vBNS," says Uomoto, "we hope to have pseudo
real-time." Images that currently take five to 10 minutes to come
across the Internet will appear in only 10 seconds with vBNS.
--MH
Photo by Mike Ciesielski
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NOVEMBER 1997 TABLE OF CONTENTS.
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