The programmable telescope


Tim Cornwell
ASKAP Computing Lead
CSIRO

Lecture slides

As a result of evolutionary pressures and the increasing costs, astronomical telescopes and facilities are continually increasing in the degree of complexity exposed to observers. The competitive advantage therefore goes to researchers who have invested in learning the appropriate tools and facilities, in contrast to researchers who prefer a canned software solution. To flourish in this new world, researchers have to be able to script observations and reduction, to access multiple databases for catalogs and perform complex queries, to visualize multi-dimensional data, to apply sophisticated statistical tools, and so on. I'll discuss how this model is evolving for radio synthesis telescopes.