OT: Distributed sky watching

[simon.proctor]

It seems I have a penchance for off topic thoughts this week. Again I found it via the BBC but I think this project to be highly exciting (to me at least :P). EStar is a way of people around the Internet gaining access to telescopes to watch the skies.

To quote the site:

The eScience Telescopes for Astronomical Research (eSTAR) Project is a programme to build a prototype robotic telescope network, to test computing infrastructure and software which could be used for larger scale projects.

In other words (and over simplified) you have a bit of software on your desktop that uses a Perl middleware of objects that make requests to telescopes. And its GPL too.

Links:
Estar here.
News Article here

I'll be downloading this later so if anyone wants a review of it let me know.

Note:
The quote was taken from the first paragraph of the site without permission.