From Sir Isaac to the Sloan survey: calculating the structure and chaos owing to gravity in the universe

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey Science Archive represents a thousand-fold increase in the total amount of data that astronomers have collected to date. The pioneering instrumentation technology that made this possible is matched by groundbreaking tools ...

Astronomy is about to undergo a major paradigm shift, with data sets becoming larger and more homogeneous, designed for the first time in a top-down fashion. In a few years, it might be much easier for astronomers to "dial-up" a part of the sky, when they ...

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s Data Archive Server (DAS) provides public access to data files produced by the SDSS data reduction pipeline. This article discusses challenges in public distribution of data of this complexity and how the project addressed ...