COMPUTERS AND THE MODERN ASTRONOMER

Stefan Mochnacki

(David Dunlap Observatory)

1. Amateurs at home have computing power equal to that of professionals at the office.

SUN UltraSPARC 10 ~ Pentium II 400 MHz.

LINUX ~ Solaris, but more complete!

BUT: Try cable modem or ADSL for high bandwidth.

2. Search Engines are your friend!

Try Google is a fairly new (1998) search engine developed at Stanford University's Computer Science Department. It has a magical ability to put THE page you are looking for right near the top of the results list. To find out how they do it and for more background about GOOGLE look at this.

3. Most (but not all) astronomical databases are freely accessible on the Web.

NASA GSFC Astronomical Catalogs & Data Tables

Canadian Astronomy Data Centre

4. Most (but not all) software used for astronomical research is free and downloadable.

The SAO R&D Software Suite