Bringing the night sky closer: discoveries in the data deluge

hroughout history, astronomers have been accustomed to data falling from the sky. But our relatively newfound ability to store the sky's data in " clouds " offers us fascinating new ways to access, distribute, use, and analyze data, both in research and in education. Here we consider three interrelated questions: (1) What trends have we seen, and will soon see, in the growth of image and data collection from telescopes? (2) How might we address the growing challenge of finding the proverbial needle in the haystack of this data to facilitate scientific discovery? (3) What visualization and analytic opportunities does the future hold? trenDs in Data Growth Astronomy has a history of data collection stretching back at least to Stonehenge more than three millennia ago. Over time, the format of the information recorded by astronomers has changed, from carvings in stone to written records and hand-drawn illustrations to photographs to digital media. While the telescope (c. 1600) and the opening up of the electromagnetic spectrum beyond wavelengths visible to the human eye (c. 1940) led to qualitative changes in the nature of astronomical investigations, they did not increase the volume of collected data nearly as much as did the advent of the Digital Age.