Distributed visual information management in astronomy

Abstract

Among the many interesting computational problems that observational astronomy poses, broad aspects of visual information management are crucial. In this regard, observational astronomy "collaboratories" provide important testbeds for other fields serving less well?defined communities-telemedicine, Earth observation, and graphic art and design come to mind. The authors review issues related to large-image visualization in astronomy and a recently developed toolset for this purpose. Resolution scale is central, offering one way to address the long?term data storage problem, and the authors review recent developments in this area. Also, to support image database querying, they define multiple-resolution information and entropy. They show how these are closely related to the compression rate and discuss using these concepts in image database querying.