"Gemini has laid the foundation for a new way of doing astronomy that will allow us to see farther, fainter and sharper than ever before," said NSF astronomy director Wayne Van Citters.

Celestial Link

Researchers at Gemini, a cooperative astronomy effort of the U.S., Canada, UK, Australia, Argentina, Brazil and Chile, are linking the telescopes on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and Cerro Pachon in the Chilean Andes through a high-speed network, known as Internet2, and AMPATH, a Florida International University Internet portal.

"Because Gemini is a single observatory with two telescopes, it is especially useful to us," Gemini spokesperson Peter Michaud told NewsFactor. "We anticipate that this trend will become important to all observatories, but the global separation of Gemini makes it uniquely significant to us."

Computing in the Skies

Michaud said the biggest impact of the Internet-linked telescopes will be the ability for astronomers to participate in observations from their home offices. "We can now match the observation with the conditions, since we don't have to wait for an astronomer to get here to make an observation," Michaud explained.

"This matching of observations with conditions is significant in assuring that when we need sharper images for a particular observation, we will be able to obtain images that have fainter, and therefore deeper, imaging capabilities."

The Gemini linkage, under development for five years, is just one example of how computing and adaptive optics processing are advancing the field of astronomy. "Because of computer processing power , we can now produce images from the ground that are several times sharper than what is possible with the Hubble Space Telescope," Michaud said. "This has really given ground-based astronomy a turbocharged boost."

Deep Space Data

In April, researchers at Johns Hopkins University announced they had designed a virtual observatory that joined three different astronomy databases using the Internet and Microsoft 's .NET Web-services platform.

That project, known as SkyQuery, was considered an important step for the National Virtual Observatory and will allow astronomers to keep up with the deluge of data they are collecting, Johns Hopkins professor Alex Szalay told NewsFactor.

"The [amount of] data is doubling every year," Szalay said. "We are taking data as fast as we can collect it, and we are choking on it. In three years, we'll have more than a petabyte (1,024 terabytes)."

Researchers said by linking telescopes, they will be able to synthesize data and learn more about the celestial subjects they study. "The ability to immediately network with scientists and engineers around the world will allow us to use our instruments more effectively and efficiently. So, in a real sense, we will be able to get more out of our instruments and maximize their effectiveness," Gemini's Michaud said.