Telescopes of the World, Unite! A Cosmic Database Emerges

May 20, 2003 | Source: New York Times

In the past 25 years, the number of CCD pixels (each acting as a miniature astronomical instrument) in all the world’s telescopes has exponentially increased by a factor of 3,000, a beneficiary of Moore’s Law.

The resulting total amount of astronomical data collected every year is doubling; surveys of millions of astronomical objects now contain about 100 terabytes of distributed data in the “National Virtual Observatory.”