The Virtual Observatory and Amateur Observers

The Virtual Observatory and its Benefits for Amateur Astronomers

“The contemporary astronomical instruments have been producing the unprecedented amount of data. The largest part of this “data avalanche” is being produced by deep all-sky surveys yielding terabytes of raw data per night. Such a great data volumes can hardly even been reduced by automatic pipelines running on supercomputer grids but it is impossible to exploit fully their content by a small group of professional astronomers in the interested research teams. New tools for collaborative work with heterogeneous data sets spread over distant servers are being developed in the framework of the Virtual Observatory (VO).”