APODers: Please excuse the temporary use of this forum for a discussion about possible futures of the Night Sky Live project. Please feel free to chime in if you wish! The following email was sent out to several people presently or formerly involved with the Night Sky Live / CONCAM project.
Dear CONCAMers,
Although it was close, the NSF has denied a large grant meant to transition the Night Sky Live project into a more sustainable future. Additionally, Lior Shamir, a key graduate student who helped sustain the network and wrote key code, has now graduated and will move on in the next month. (Lior actually won a dissertation award at MTU for his work with the project.) Next, the computers that run the NSL project and even the disks are aging badly and will likely not go another year, if that. Therefore, the question has come up -- what should we do with the Night Sky Live Project now? There are several options.
1. Just close up shop. This means that we here at MTU will no longer support the project at all. The web pages will be replaced with a web page thanking everyone for their support during the project. The observatories that currently have a CONCAM can keep using them but must now entirely support them by themselves, software and everything.
2. Hand off the entire project to another person and/or institution to lead. For this we would have to have at least one volunteer!
3. Retain only the web server. The NSF has indicated they might spring some for a web serving computer and even some disks. NSF at MTU would become only a web server, and all other functions will be handed off to the observatories that deploy the CONCAMs. We would grab images as they allowed and display them on the NSL web site. One problem with this is that it would require some coding and even maintenance, and I don't know where that money will come from.
4. Please tell me your idea! Please respond in this thread that is here so everyone can see everyone else's comments.
The time scale for this transition will be over the next few months. I am interested in any good feedback.
- Robert Nemiroff
What to do with Night Sky Live Project?
-
nbrosch
- Ensign
- Posts: 78
- Joined: Tue Jul 27, 2004 1:45 pm
- Location: Back at Tel Aviv University after a sabbatical
Future of NightSkyLive
I understand the problem of maintaining operations given the lack of funds and expert support from Lior Shamir. However, I do not think that you Bob should "close up shop". This is because (a) some funding may appear later along the road, and (b) another person with Lior Shamir's qualifications might appear and take over his duties. I suggest adopting an intermediate measure in which only the server would be kept. The cameras that still function will stay on and the data would be publicly available.
I must say that I recently visited SAAO (South Africa). The SALT control room is equipped with a large number of flat screens to control the various functions of this giant telescope. One of the screens shows the current weather with air temperatures inside the dome and out, the humidity, wind speed and direction, etc. The screen also features an all-sky image from their CONCAM; a quick check shows that this is the last image obtained by the SAAO CONCAM about a year ago!
I checked with the SAAO management. They would like their CONCAM to work but have currently a manpower shortage and this is not high on their priorities. Maintaining the NightSkyLive organization, even if in a semi-dormant state, would allow restarting it whenever the conditions would be adequate.
Noah Brosch
I must say that I recently visited SAAO (South Africa). The SALT control room is equipped with a large number of flat screens to control the various functions of this giant telescope. One of the screens shows the current weather with air temperatures inside the dome and out, the humidity, wind speed and direction, etc. The screen also features an all-sky image from their CONCAM; a quick check shows that this is the last image obtained by the SAAO CONCAM about a year ago!
I checked with the SAAO management. They would like their CONCAM to work but have currently a manpower shortage and this is not high on their priorities. Maintaining the NightSkyLive organization, even if in a semi-dormant state, would allow restarting it whenever the conditions would be adequate.
Noah Brosch
I am too far removed from the situation to ponder a suggestion though I too would like to see this service continue. I just had to chime in and offer this comment:
At least you chose the right board to post this message to. It seems to be the only one to which the spammers are being actively challenged. While any of the other NSL BBS sites might have been a more appropriate choice for the subject, they have too much spam and porn link posts on them to be useful. Cafe is the worst of the group.
So you picked the right board for this particular subject. It is certain to foster some serious discussion.
At least you chose the right board to post this message to. It seems to be the only one to which the spammers are being actively challenged. While any of the other NSL BBS sites might have been a more appropriate choice for the subject, they have too much spam and porn link posts on them to be useful. Cafe is the worst of the group.
So you picked the right board for this particular subject. It is certain to foster some serious discussion.
I am with BMA here; forgive us for offtopic, but this is rare occurence when you could actually read what people have to say. I am former owner of "makc" moderator account, that is now shared by several people here to figh spam. Unfortunately, moderator permissions aren't enough to maintain decent order here, and I hereby kindly ask you to PM this board administration password to me, so I can do something about (because you obviously running out of volunteers), and you will save some breath to deal with other issues you have posted above. Thank you for consideration.