Description
The Space-Time Machine enables humans to travel through outer space, and through time, tounderstand the origins of our Universe. It provides live access for professionals, amateurs andstudents of the Universe to the most up-to-date online astronomical data available, as well as tohistorical astronomical data sets, some of which extend back more than 100 years.
The STM’s key features will include:
- a seamless interface to multiple surveys and composite images
- retrieval of "raw" astronomical data
- visualization and uploading of personal data in the context of the Virtual Observatory
- integrated access to tools for data analysis
- digital access to the world’s largest historical archive of astronomical images
- digital access to the world’s largest collection of astronomical time series
The STM consortium’s work at present represents the union of three efforts:
- The “DASCH” project offers Digital Access to a Sky Century at Harvard, by scanning and digitizing—thereby liberating—more than half a million images of the sky, covering a 100-year time baseline. These are currently housed on glass plates at the Harvard College Observatory.
- The Time Series Center (TSC), a joint venture of the IIC and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, digitally collects and serves nearly all extant time-series data, along with search and analysis tools. It will also maintain links to data from the next big time-domain projects in astronomy, such as Pan-Starrs and LSST. The TSC brings together computer scientists, statisticians and astronomers in the development of algorithms for automatic detection and classification of patterns and unusual signals in these data.
- The World Wide Telescope (WWT) project at Microsoft Research provides a beautiful interface for exploring real images of the sky and for creating hypermedia “tours” of astronomical images and data. The STM Consortium is working with Microsoft Research to develop a professional version, WWT Pro. WWT and WWT Pro, in collaboration with ongoing National Virtual Observatory efforts, will provide flexible access to and visualization of large and varied data sets for both professional and amateur astronomers.
In a coordinated educational effort, the Science Media Group at the CfA is creating the Advanced Universe of Learning (AUL), a project that formally links classroom teachers and students to the STM.
