Thanks to the magic of Roweis's students, we use the Google Maps (tm) interface to browse USNO, Tycho, and other astrometric catalogs in the astrometry.net project. This is easy, because the Google Maps interface is quick to implement and use, and it can be employed to effectively browse enormous images or data with very little coding on our server and none on our clients (it just runs in your browser!). The success of this has led Blanton and me to decide to browse all of our SDSS imaging in this way. Today I started building the images for this. I will learn the Google Maps API once the images are built (in about 100 CPU-days). As a side benefit, we will have built all the images we need to re-detect and re-measure the bright end of the catalog.
This sounds like the start of "Google Sky" (as my good friend Miguel Verdugo always calls this missing tool)???
ReplyDeleteIt would be nice to have a tool like this, to browser archives, a unified data center for the sky.