Pan STARRS announcement

news.yahoo.com/s/space/20081217/sc_space...roidhuntgoesgranular

Looks like the amateur is gradually being squeezed out of this area of astronomy aswell as elsewhere. Amateurs may be reduced to supplying follow up data only.

Lets hope it has major teething problems

phoenix wrote:

Lets hope it has major teething problems

That's the spirit Kieran! Don't let those supercool, superbig, super powerful telescopes funded with supermillions mounted with a super digital camera get you down...

Seanie.

: cheer:

It will still be a while before PANSTARRS has the sort of impact that has long been hoped by some and feared by many!

There is still a lof of amateur discoveries to be made yet!

I think the biggests problems they will have will be in the data analysis area. For the amount of data (the eventual number of scopes) will collect, they'll need some seriously heavyweight processing power to crunch it all.

I'd also agree with Dave G that it looks like it'll be a while before the project is fully off the ground and so we (amateurs) can still contribute. Furthermore, for those who want to get into photometry, Pan STARRS will in fact be a bonus.

I guess as ever, its a case of "watch this cpace..."

Dave

They may do something like galaxy zoo and farm out the data to amateurs.