Exploring Terabyte Archives in Astronomy

Astronomy is about to undergo a major paradigm shift, with data sets becoming larger, and more homogeneous, for the first time designed in the top-down fashion. In a few years it may be much easier to “dial-up” a part of the sky, when we need a rapid observation than wait for several months to access a (sometimes quite small) telescope. With several projects in multiple wavelengths under way, like the SDSS, 2MASS, GSC-2, POSS2, ROSAT, FIRST and DENIS projects, each surveying a large fraction of the sky, the concept of having a “Digital Sky,” with multiple, TB size databases interoperating in a seamless fashion is no longer an outlandish idea. More and more catalogs will be added and linked to the existing ones, query engines will become more sophisticated, and astronomers will have to be just as familiar with mining data as with observing on telescopes.