MISAO Project

Home Page       Fri May 22 10:10:11 JST 1998

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Importance of network

People can examine their own images with a simple stand-alone reduction software and check existence of new stars referring to some star catalog CD-ROMs. But in this case, another profit expected with the images, observation data accumulation, is ignored. Although new stars may be found and reported, data of other stars are lost. In addition, no one have a interests and knowledge of all kinds of stars. It implies that they probably miss a new star if it is not what they are interest in.

On the other hand, the system in my project is in Java and implemented in server/client model using HORB. Because network programming is very easy in Java using HORB, the system comes to have some great advantages.

First, all data obtained from an image is sent to the server, reserved there and become open in the public. It means, not only the owner of each image but anyone can refer and study the data. As mentioned before, common ownership of all data can be considered as a big survey project as world wide collaboration. Most current surveys require huge costs and are limited to a specific purpose. On the contrary, gathering data of all images requires no cost except for making the system, and has no limitation.

Another profit of common ownership of data is that the database can contain continuous observation data. It means, people can see how a star has been behaving and changing with some observation data in different time, without keeping observation of the star by themselves.

In addition, there are many WWW sites which serve various kinds of astronomical information all over the world. Although there are some CD-ROMs available, much more information are open in WWW. Observatories began to make their own images or data open now. Furthermore, the CD-ROMs are not updated, as far as they do not buy new one. The latest information are only available via WWW. The system implemented in Java can easily refer to such information.

next up previous
Next: PIXY system Up: Database Astronomy using HORB Previous: MISAO project

Copyright(C) Seiichi Yoshida (comet@aerith.net). All rights reserved.