RAI Data Archives Projects

The BIMA Data Archive

When it was first brought on-line in 1994, the BIMA Data Archive was the first telescope archive that could deliver data to astronomers over the Web. Since then, the RAI group has developed it into a highly-automated archiving system for the Berkeley-Maryland-Illinois Array Telescope (BIMA). In this system, raw data is transfered in real-time from the telescope in Northern California to an archive at NCSA where the data is made available to astronomers via a Web interface. A major goal of the development was to facilitate near-real-time observing in which the data could be quickly processed with an NCSA supercomputer so that the results could be used to steer the observations.

Access to the archive is restricted to BIMA observers. For more information on the BIMA Data Archive system, see the paper by Plante and Crutcher (1997).

The NCSA Astronomy Digital Image Library

This public digital library collects research-quality astronomical images and makes them available to researchers and the general public via the Web. Visitors can search the contents of the Library, browse the images, and download them for further analysis. It also allows astronomers to add their images to the Libraries collection, facilitating data publishing as a new way to share scientific results.

The BIMA Image Pipeline

The BIMA Image Pipeline is a new system under development that extends the capabilities of BIMA as a networked telescope. As an extension of the BIMA Data Archive, this system will automatically turn raw telescope data into images that are ready for analysis by BIMA astronomers. As data is transfered from the telescope to the Archive at NCSA, it will be sent on to the pipeline for processing with the help of the AIPS++software package and parallel machines at NCSA. This resulting processed data will be sent back to the archive where it is made available to astronomers for further analysis. As the pipeline matures, greater support for interaction with the pipeline by astronomers will be enabled. The final goal is to create a flexible portal environment for interacting with the telescope, either for steering real-time processing or initiating large archive research projects.

This work is being supported in part through our collaborations with the ALMA Development Consortium (ADC) and the AIPS++ consortium (both of which include our partner observatories, BIMA and NRAO). The BIP will server as a prototype system for the interferometer telescopes such as ALMA and CARMA.