Vibration from equipment mounted on the telescope and in summit support buildings has been a source of performance degradation at existing astronomical observatories, particularly for adaptive optics performance. Rather than relying only on best practices to minimize vibration, we present here a vibration budget that specifies allowable force levels from each source of vibration in the observat...

A team from the University of Washington (UW), the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI), the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and the Institute for Pacific Ocean Science and Technology (IPOST) of Canada is jointly developing the North East Pacific Time-series Underwater Networked Experiment (NEPTUNE). NEPTUNE is being designed as a long...

We propose a method for in situ measurement of the length of kilometer size Fabry-Perot cavities in laser gravitational wave detectors. The method is based on the vernier, which occurs naturally when the laser incident on the cavity has a sideband. By changing the length of the cavity over several wavelengths we obtain a set of carrier resonances alternating with sideband resonances. From the m...

If clustering of the arrival directions of ultra high energy cosmic rays is discovered, this would provide important information about their origin, composition, and the galactic and extragalactic magnetic fields. We present here the analysis of the autocorrelation function of the data from the Pierre Auger Observatory as a function of the angular scale and the energy threshold. We compare our ...

We have developed a simple and robust system based on standard UNIX tools and frame library code to transfer and merge data from multiple gravitational wave detectors distributed worldwide. The transfer and merger take place with less than 20 min delay and the output frames are available for all participants. Presently VIRGO and LIGO participate in the exchange and only environmental data is sh...

In response to the charge “How can we best develop a systematic understanding of the intersection between human abilities, cartographic design decisions, and map use context? Can we predict what will work?” I argue for building a geovisual analytics observatory (GeO) to frame and support fundamental investigations based on empirical evidence of the who, what, how, when and why of human inferenc...

The architecture of Montage which delivers custom science grade astronomical images was presented at ADASS XII That architecture has been tested on MASS images computed on single processor Linux machines that hold all image data in memory This year we describe the design of a grid enabled version of Montage suitable for large scale pro cessing of the sky It exploits to the maximum the paralleli...

We describe the results of two near infrared (K-band) imaging surveys and a three color (JHK) survey of the vicinity of NGC 7538. The limiting magnitudes are K ≃ 16.5 and K ≃ 17.5 mag for the K-band surveys and K ≃ 15 mag for the JHK survey. We identify more than 2000 and 9000 near-infrared (NIR) sources on the images of the two Observations reported here were obtained at the MMT Observatory, a...

VOFilter is an XML based filter developed by the Chinese Virtual Observatory project to transform tabular data files from VOTable format into OpenDocument format. VOTable is an XML format defined for the exchange of tabular data in the context of the Virtual Observatory (VO). It is the first Proposed Recommendation defined by International Virtual Observatory Alliance, and has obtained wide sup...