SoylentNews

AnonTechie writes:

Not sure how many people here are into Amateur Astronomy. This is a neat project if it works as advertised.

Amateur astronomers worried that Big Astronomy would render them obsolete can relax: the kinds of techniques used to create huge virtual telescopes are now being applied to the huge collections of astro-pics published on the Internet. As keen astronomy-watchers know, the effective aperture of telescopes can be expanded by linking multiple instruments in different parts of the world. In radio-astronomy, this is the principle behind the Square Kilometer Array, and the same techniques can be applied to optical telescopes.

What's different about the proposal in this paper at Arxiv is that its authors, led by Dustin Lang of Carnegie Mellon University (along with David Hogg of New York University and Bernhard Scholkopf of the Max Planck Institute in Germany) is that they want to correlate and combine the vast store of astronomy images that amateurs publish on the Internet.

Example image here

The top row shows some of the input images Lang used to create the final composite. The final tone-mapped consensus image, bottom right, shows debris from the galactic cataclysm that isn't visible in any of the individual source images.