Podcaster: Rob Sparks
Title: ANTARES: Finding Rare Astronomical Events
Links: www.noao.edu ; http://www.ctio.noao.edu/; @NOAONorth
Description: Astronomy is becoming a data intensive science. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will continually survey the night sky and find a large number of events that occur in the sky, up to one million per night. Sorting through this data will be key to finding the truly unusual and rare events. In this podcast, Dr. Abhi Sahs describes the ANTARES project which will develop techniques to deal with this influx of data.
Bio: Rob Sparks is a science education specialist in the Education and Public Outreach (EPO) group at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) and works on the Galileoscope project (www.galileoscope.org), providing design, dissemination and professional development. He blogs at halfastro.wordpress.com.
Abi Saha is an astronomer at NOAO. His research work is mostly about variable stars, and their use in addressing other problems in astronomy.
He worked with two competing teams for discovering and measuring Cepheid variables in external galaxies using data from the Hubble Space telescope to determine the expansion rate of the Universe. He has worked on charting the tenuous exteriors of our own Galaxy and also of the Magellanic Clouds, and on trying to answer the question of how galaxies have formed and evolved by identifying and examining the behavior of their oldest stars. His service work has been at open access observatories (Space Telescope Science Institute and NOAO), supporting the community of astronomers, and participating in development, maintenance, and management of these facilities, and includes serving as interim director of the Kitt Peak National Observatory. He is currently engaged in several aspects of the LSST project, concerning observation planning, calibration methods, and data utilization.
End of podcast:
365 Days of Astronomy
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The 365 Days of Astronomy Podcast is produced by the New Media Working Group of the International Year of Astronomy 2009. Audio post-production by Preston Gibson. Bandwidth donated by libsyn.com and wizzard media. Web design by Clockwork Active Media Systems. You may reproduce and distribute this audio for non-commercial purposes. Please consider supporting the podcast and Astrosphere New Media Association with a contribution. Visit us on the web at 365DaysOfAstronomy.org or email us at info@365DaysOfAstronomy.org. Until tomorrow…