Archive of Observatory Data

Data acquired at Shared Skies Observatories in Kentucky, Queensland, and Arizona are saved in a long term archive accessible through www.astro.louisville.edu and the networks at the universities.

The central server is mtkent3.louisville.edu, currently with 16 TB of on-line storage, but expandable to more than 50 TB. It is duplicated by mtkent4.louisville.edu to make a fault-tolerant storage system and access point for users, both within the university and on the public Internet. We also maintain some off-line storage of critical data.

Raw data are acquired and stored temporarily on the control computers at each telescope. During observation sessions, these data are copied as acquired to the central observatory server where they will be saved for at least 1 year. The servers at Moore and at Mt. Kent observatories are synchronized to the main storage server at the University of Louisville, and daily data will be available within hours of its acquisition. The computer running the telescope at Mt. Lemmon is not at this time on the system, but we anticipate incorporating similar long term storage for its data during 2018.

In order for data to be available within Australia without the intercontinental transfer, the data acquired at Mt. Kent are immediately on-line from the Mt. Kent server through a high speed network connection to the Toowoomba campus of the University of Southern Queensland.

Access to individual remote user data and a public data set of interesting results are available through http://www.astro.louisville.edu/shared_skies/archive/.