On how Arcsecond is helping both amateurs and professionals.
Intro
Some years ago, I was working in the La Silla Observatory (Chile), as support astronomer (helping visiting observers to perform their observations, and doing some of them myself too – the so-called “Service Mode”). When you are doing research in astrophysics, you come to the telescope with a few scientific questions, and you’ve already chosen the targets you will observe to tackle these questions.
During my Ph.D. the scientific question I put myself in charge to provide answer for, was: does binarity compensante for the low metallicity (fraction of elements heavier than… helium!) in the appearance of Wolf-Rayet stars in the Magellanic Cloud? (Wolf-Rayet stars are massive windy stars close to the end of their life, and the Magellanic Clouds are two southern galaxies nearby our Milky Way). You can read the associated articles here and here.
Ok, this is full of unknown words for someone not used to massive star evolution. But you may already guess that I’ve made many observations of Wolf-Rayet stars in the Magellanic Clouds. Below is a picture from the Paranal Observatory (home of the VLT), where one can see the Large Magellanic Cloud (seemingly big star “cluster” in the picture center) and the Small one (a bit to the upper-right).
But the sky is vast and astronomy is very diverse. Even if it all started as a project for professionals, Arcsecond aims to be a platform for all astronomical observations. That is, it is also offering useful tools and services for so-called “amateurs”.
Between you and me, I’ve never been confortable with this term of “amateur”, because I always wonder if it is a bit pejorative or not. To me, “amateurs” are simply a different mode of the same species: astronomers! Their knowledge of the sky is often amazing (and richer and more developed than many pros), not mentioning their ability to drive sometimes crazy large and complex equipment! Even if I made observations with the VLT in the past, I do not forget there are whole teams with dozens of people to run the observatory, to make it really easy for me!
For amateurs…
Back to Arcsecond. The feature I would like to highlight is something that some (not all) amateurs use very often: an easy way to know what’s observable tonight! And for the former pro I was, it was first a surprise, since I always knew in advance what I was planning to observe. But many amateurs are approaching the observations from “the other side”!
Consequently, with the powerful tools and mechanism developed for the Night Explorer, I’ve made available a /tonight page, pictured below. The idea is simple: gather in one view the night, the visible targets, the moon, the constellations and (when possible), the expected magnitude and size.
And for active/famous comets (the mean expected magnitudes will soon be included too):
As you can see, the new comet “C/2024 G3 (ATLAS)” has now moved to the southern hemisphere and is not visible anymore in France (too bad…)
With such a page, it becomes extremely easy to know what is observable tonight in your location, for different category of objects (including my own specials). I hope that the available categories cover most of the needs. Of course, feel free to contact me any time to update the selection. Especially on active comets!
And for pros…
Professional astronomy is relying on huge datasets and catalogues. Since more than two decades now, a dedicated “standard” has been defined to help astronomers share data and information specifically in the context of the astronomical observations (extremely rich and diverse in its forms).
It’s called the “Virtual Observatory” (VO), and it is driven by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA). I prepare a dedicated post on the VO. But one of the feature I’ve been working on is to make Arcsecond VO-compliant!
It is not an easy task, since philosophies are a bit different. But the goal is the same: make Arcsecond resources available through the VOTable standard (among other things). For that, we are developing a dedicated “renderer” (that is, a way to the server to tell in what format should the data be serialized).
You can access a good example here! To be compared to the standard “JSON” format, for the same resource (the NTT telescope): raw and well-presented for browsers.
The goal of this effort is to make sure Arcsecond is a good citizen, and and a good player with other astronomy-related and VO-related services around the world.
Clear skies to all!
One response
[…] Two key ideas to keep in mind before I stop my rant against the VO. First, Arcsecond will be somehow “VO-compliant” since resources will be available in VOTable format (example here – yes, sometimes you must nonetheless comply…). I’ve written a small post about how I do it in Arcsecond. […]