ESOcast 104: Data2Dome: From the Universe to You

The Universe is a big place, it’s a really big place and everyday there are just amazing discoveries made. We have images and videos being published all over the planet. Imagine if we could get all that amazing stuff out into the planetariums on a daily basis. It would turn the planetariums into a completely new kind of facility that would be dynamic and attached directly to the science. Usually it took days or maybe weeks to get the latest science, the latest discoveries into the planetariums, but by having a standard we can do this now in a matter of minutes. ESO has teamed up with Evans & Sutherland and the International Planetarium Society and others from the community to make a standard. We call it Data2Dome in order to get the latest information into the domes. In a sense the vision of the Data2Dome is to seamlessly integrate images and videos into the planetariums worldwide. The International Planetarium Society is working hard to bring cutting edge science into planetaria around the world. Data2Dome will help enable this by bringing images, datasets, and press releases straight from the researchers into the planetarium dome. Well imagine that you come in, in the morning as a planetarium presenter and on your desk in front of you, you have the latest things: the latest images, the latest news, the latest videos, and you can pick maybe the latest datasets from telescopes around the world, and in space. You can be a kind of astronomical weatherman who could then pick from those and present exactly what you feel is relevant to your community. This is paradigm shifting technology. It’s actually pretty simple. The Data2Dome standard describes how observatories and agencies such as ESO, NASA, or ESA can publish JSON feeds with all the images, videos and all the other content they have. JSON is exactly the standard data exchange format which is very similar to RSS which is commonly used for getting up to date information from websites for example. The idea was to keep it as simple as possible to help observatories and agencies to publish their data without having a high barrier of entrance. Already today every planetarium equipped with Digistar 6 can access Data2Dome. For a few clicks the presenters can access all the data available through the Data2Dome platform. On top of images and videos, Data2Dome also provides an astronomical database of events. What’s going on in the sky, historical events, what happened today. As the first adopter and software integrator for Data2Dome in the planetarium community, Evans & Sutherland is ensuring the ingestion and presentation of the data in Digistar is as seamless and useful as possible. Planetarium operators now have direct access to thousands of assets and events from data providers all around the world, with more content being added every day. Of course we have to help people along, and we also have to curate and pick among the many things that happen and this is part of the system as well. We’re really excited to work with Evans & Sutherland and our partners in the community around this common project. Transcription by ESO; translation by —