Dreaming big... network of scopes

[Bob Denny]

Funny thing... I just appeared on a panel on the Future of Telescope Networks at the Robotic Telescopes, Student Research, and Education conference. Here's the view from my chair (Paul Gardner to my left, Russ Genet to my right, Richard Berry more to my right):

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After panel members from Las Cumbres Observatory and Skynet Robotic Telescope Network described their (relatively) small networks of tightly integrated and centrally controlled observatories, and one other panel member talked about his dream of being able to access spectrographs and speckle interferometers, I threw it out to the audience: What do you think of when you think of a telescope network? That kicked off a great discussion with some surprising results. (1) Before anything else, people need to know how to produce scientifically useful data, to include proper calibration. (2) A very important network would be one which provided storage and access to data from multiple observatories.

Without inhibiting thought, I will feel free to make calls about practicality in any discussion here. I once witnessed a presentation by some professional astronomers dreaming of telescope networks and trying to solve the problem where everyone wants their work to be done on the "best/biggest/fastest" scope on the net, oh and it's not theirs. They presented their idea of a computerized algorithmic system for price/points negotiation in real time, with multi-phased request/response protocol and heuristics for pricing agreement. I just sat there thinking "this problem has been addressed by every financial trading house, right?" They really were going to do this.

I understand your idea of combining observatories. LCO does the "spanning the globe" thing but all of the big scopes are theirs so they have total control over them. I have thought about the possibilities, and done some designs and simulations, and I know how I would approach what I would call "cooperative data acquisition". But I won't say anything here for now.

To me the number one problem is how to determine if your observatory can do something that comes in as a request (no matter HOW it comes in). What is the quality measure? What is the capability measure?

I'm going to move this into the General section since it is not related to our products (yet anyway).