Astronomical Virtual Laboratory

Overview

          As a project coordinated and lead by Computer Network Information Center of Chinese Academy of Sciences (CNIC), Astronomical Virtual Laboratory (AVLAB) is an initiative of the National S&T Basic Infrastructure to enable collaborative working across astronomers geographically distributed through making available to the astronomers simple-to-use astronomical telescopes and astronomical data sharing over Internet. The astronomical instruments involved in this project, such as the 2.16m telescope at Xinglong Station, the largest ground-based optical telescope in China up till now, and 1.56m optical telescope at Sheshan Station, are operated respectively by another two partners of this project, National Astronomical Observatories of CAS (NAOC) and Shanghai Astronomical Observatory of CAS (SHAO). 


The AVLAB will accomplish its mission by
*         Enabling remote access to astronomical resources distributed over China, such as astronomical telescopes and mass astronomical data for the astronomers.
*         Providing a virtual environment for astronomers to communicate with each other in real time.
*         Exploring a new collaborative working mode for astronomers and support advanced methods in astronomical research and education.
Accomplishments
*        The first milestone of AVLAB has been achieved by the establishment of the AVLAB website http://astro.v-lab.cn, through which astronomers can easily submit an application to use a ground-based astronomical telescope.
*        Access to 5 telescopes，the 2.16m telescope, 30cm telescope, sun telescope, wide-angle telescope located in Xinglong Observatory and the 1.56m telescope located in Sheshan Observatory is supported by AVLAB.
*        By the end of April 2007 more than one hundred people from China, Russia and Japan registered as users of the AVLAB which has been running smoothly.
*        Several valuable collaborative observations were made by the 2.16m and 1.56m telescopes through the AVLAB. In June and September 2006, a live broadcasting event of the Mars-M44 and sunspots was performed respectively.
*        Large amounts of astronomical data, 1.3TB SDSS data and 179 GB CDS data, are available at AVLAB.
Future
*         In the end the 2007, telescopes maintained by Yunnan Astronomical Observatory will be included in the AVLAB.
*         A sequence of collaborative observations by multi-telescopes and astronomers will be performed to meet the demands of pertinent scientific projects.
*         To impact the students’ attitudes towards Astronomy and promote the Astronomy Education, a specific virtual environment will be developed and deployed in September 2007 attracting the students to control some telescopes over the Internet and get first hand experiences.
*         A real-time multimedia communication tool, supporting online meetings and discussions by providing web-based, text and streaming audio and video communication, will be integrated into the AVLAB in July 2007.
*         Further investigation will be conducted on the remote access technologies of radio telescopes.