AstroTwitter: Tweeting the Cosmos

The year is 2010 and the Lovell Radio Telescope - the flagship of the Jodrell Bank Center for Astrophysics in Manchester, UK-  picks up a signal that's not a pulsar, but instead, finally, is a true signal from a civilization in a remote edge of the Milky Way.

If Stuart Lowe -a member of the ESA's Planck spacecraft's Core Team who runs a radio telescope at the Jodrell Bank- has his way the world will know of the discovery in realtime along with the Jodrell Bank team. The Jodrell Bank runs an array of seven radio telescopes distributed across the UK with a resolution greater than the Hubble Space Telescope.

Lowe is creating a totally cool service called AstroTwitter to generate a Twitter feed associated with a telescope that announces in real time what it is looking at. Lowe wants to create a mashup that displays the telescope's target in apps such as Google Sky or Microsoft's World Wide Telescope.

The success of the Twitter feed from NASA's Phoenix Mars Lander is leading to an explosion of new web-based scientific communications.
 
AstroTwitter could also feed AstroGrid, the doorway to Virtual Observatory, which provide a suite of desktop applications to enable astronomers to explore and bookmark resources from around the world, find data, store and share files in VOSpace, query databases, plot and manipulate tables, cross-match cataloges, and build and run scripts to automate sequences of tasks. 

Posted by Jason McManus.

Image Credit: Alan Clark, Jodrell Bank radio telescope in Cheshire, England, was turned into a giant projection screen for a light show to celebrate 50 years since sputnik, and also the 50th birthday of the telescope.

Sources:
http://twitter.com/jodrellbank

http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/23

Comments

[bitirim]

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[Dan Fischer]

One really cannot say that with the Jodrell Bank service we have "a telescope that announces in real time what it is looking at" - it merely puts out raw coordinate after coordinate, without identifying the actual object being looked at, nor the nature of the observation, let alone the actual goal of the observation.

How can this impress anyone, justifying a robotic twitter feed? The only use for this kind of raw stuff is indeed mash-up software for graphical display or statistical analysis - which could be handed the numbers in a much more convenient and stable way (e.g. through FTP) without nibbling at Twitter's ever-close-to-collapse bandwidth.

Something deserving the name "AstroTwitter" the current Jodrell Bank service certainly is not - and even to compare it to NASA's space mission feeds is absurd: There real people convey the excitement and ops details of missions and you actually learn something along the way.

[Stuart]

Daniel, I think you've missed the point and confused an aim with something (very basic) that already exists.

[Daniel Fischer]

Dan: critique of a bad paper and its uncritical reception with hard arguments (case in point: just met the 'over capacity' fail whale again).

Stuart: no arguments whatsoever other than that Dan somehow doesn't get it.

Conclusion: you decide ...

[Stuart]

Daniel, sorry?

You built a strawman by holding the existing @LovellTelescope twitter feed up as the example of the idea. It is a rough, sketch of what the idea would be. You knocked down your strawman for reasons I agree with. Why I am wrong to agree? What has your encounter with fail whale got to do with it?

I am trying to work out if you actually hate the real idea (not simply a basic implementation of a draft) or if you specifically have a problem with me. You have been quite hostile in several things I have done and I am wondering what is the cause of the (apparent) personal grudge.

[Daniel Fischer]

I thought my points were clear but here they are again:

* Twitter is a medium by which people talk to people - or at least robots talk to people in a way that makes sense (i.e. with words and links).

* MarsPhoenix is exactly that: a human (whom I've met BTW) talking in plain English to other people (though impersonating a robot for well-known reasons).

* The Jodrell Bank telescope coordinate feeds (which feature prominently in the paper, so why should I not discuss them?) are nothing like that at all: They distribute raw coordinates that even most professional astronomers wouldn't be able to make any sense of (unless it's their pet object).

* Whether mash-ups that use such streams of raw numbers e.g. for graphical displays make sense is another matter - IMHO they would only give an illusion of being witness to something when in fact you have no clue what the telescope is actually doing. But this doesn't bother me.

* What is bothering me, however, is that robotic raw number feeds abuse a free service that is always close to overload (fail whale sightings have actually increased in recent days). If you want to do it, fine, but please use FTP servers or web sites that the mash-uppers access directly. Which would also be more stable; today Twitter ground to a halt several times.

Now you may object that on the WWW new applications appear all the time or that the WWW originally was meant to transfer science data while now it's used for entertainment, commerce etc. True, but we learned the lessons in the 1990's (remember "WWW = World Wide Wait"?). Twitter just barely copes with its normal use - thus I strongly oppose using it for raw data transmission.

Now why don't I see these caveats in all the "cool idea!!!!!" postings ...