Virtual observatories and armchair cosmology

[Chronos]

I thought this was pretty interesting:

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0504006
Title: Virtual Observatory: From Concept to Implementation
Authors: S.G. Djorgovski, R. Williams

Is this the beginning of an era of armchair cosmology?

 

[Andromeda321]

At our school's astro dept we just hired a new prof whose skills were best summed up as a "data miner" who went through SEDS data and prettied it up, noticed what was interesting, etc. Never plans to actually apply for telescope time herself. Astronomy is changing for certain.

 

[Nereid]

"Armchair astronomy" has been around for some time now - with both the 'raw' and 'processed' data from so many top observatories in the public domain, anyone with a broadband internet connection, a half-way decent PC, the appropriate software, and time and interest, has been able to do research that only a few decades ago many professional astronomers would have killed for!

The 'virtual observatory' initiatives just make the combining of datasets from different observatories, instruments, bands, epochs, etc a whole lot easier. Long live data miners!