AstroTwitter
S. R. Lowe (Submitted on 1 Jul 2009)
AstroTwitter aims to make it easy for both professional and amateur telescopes to let the world know what they are observing in real-time.
Comments: Published in “.Astronomy: Networked Astronomy and the New Media”, 2009, edited by R.J. Simpson, D. Ward-Thompson. Length : 10 pages, 7 figures
Subjects: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM); Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph)
Cite as: arXiv:0907.0193v1 [astro-ph.IM]
Submission history
From: Stuart Lowe [view email]
[v1] Wed, 1 Jul 2009 16:30:31 GMT (1051kb)
In practice, each observatory or telescope (amateur and professional) would create its own account on AstroTwitter. They would be able to define various details about their account such as their username, a short biography or description, their location and an image. With straightforward APIs, it will be easy for those telescopes to pipe their data into the service in the most appropriate way for them. Being dedicated to astronomy, these data can then be provided in a wider variety of specialized output formats than currently provided by Twitter. These could include:
* Webpage
* RSS feeds
* Simple XML feeds
* Google Sky overlays
* Twitter updates
* Website widgets
* VOEvents
* Links to nearby objects (Aladin)
* Links to papers about the object (ADS)
* Links to press release images (VAMP)
It should also be possible to provide some of these outputs for user-defined groups of telescopes.
