Crowd-Sourced Sky Map...

Credit: Technology Review

TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: Astrophotography is currently undergoing a revolution thanks to the increased availability of high quality digital cameras and the software available to process the pictures after they have been taken.

Since photographs of the night sky are almost always better with long exposures that capture more light, this processing usually involves combining several images of the same part of the sky to produce one with a much longer effective exposure.

That’s all straightforward if you’ve taken the pictures yourself with the same gear under the same circumstances. But astronomers want to do better.

“The astrophotography group on Flickr alone has over 68,000 images,” say Dustin Lang at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and a couple of pals. These and other images represent a vast source of untapped data for astronomers.

Physics arXiv: Towards building a Crowd-Sourced Sky Map
Dustin Lang, David W. Hogg, Bernhard Scholkopf