A new age for the oldest science

For the millenia that human beings have been looking up at the night sky, astronomy meant sketching what you saw, making star maps by estimating the relative brightnesses of each individual star by eye, and tracing the seemingly erratic routes of the planets (a word meaning ‘The Wanderers’ in Greek) against the celestial sphere.

Even the advent of the telescope didn’t change this much. Sure, astronomers could see fainter objects like the moons of Jupiter, and resolve point-like planets into disks with structures of color and shade. But the human visual system remained an integral component, limiting data-gathering to what could be seen and sketched by human observers in real time.

Now, thanks to distributed computing, there’s an easier way to view and record this information — which is transforming ‘the oldest science.’ With the year 2009 marking the International Year of Astronomy (and the 400th anniversary of Galileo’s creation of the telescope) what is this “bright new age of astronomy?”

Open Science Grid

An unexpected bounty of Near Earth Objects

When a Fermilab researcher realized NEOs were hidden in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, he used the grid to ferret them out.

European Space Agency

Grid in a cloud: processing the astronomically large

A new way to process massive datasets, using test data from something truly astronomical in size and subject: the Gaia project.

Link of the week Nature Networks After you have read our stories about astronomy and distributed computing, do you find yourself wanting to know more? Now you can. Read more				Image of the week Space viewed through X-ray glasses Read more