Below is a summary of the various facilities members of the
Astronomy group use in their research. Students working in the group
have access to all of these.
Local Facilities
Computer Facilities
the WOPR beowulf cluster
The department maintains computing facilities, consisting of UNIX
workstations and Linux PCs, for support of data analysis and
theoretical work. Use of these resources is described in our
local documentation. Several faculty have small
beowulf clusters for research. In addition the University has a 470
processor cluster,
Seawulf available
for graduate student use. Stony Brook also is part of the New York
Center for Computational Science and together with Brookhaven National
Lab run a large IBM Blue Gene/L machine (> 36,000 processors),
New York Blue.
Mount Stony Brook
The
Mount
Stony Brook Observatory is a new Meade 14 inch telescope in a dome
on the roof of our building. We have 2 CCD cameras for it and a
spectrograph. It is currently used for graduate and undergraduate
classes and during
Open
Nights
Libraries
The
Mathematics, Physics,
Astronomy Library has a collection covering Astronomy and
Planetary Sciences in addition to Physics and Mathematics. The
collection now numbers over 25,000 books and serials and over 15,000
bound volumes of journals. The library subscribes to 525
journals. Access to databases is available through the Melville
Library bibliographical searching department. The total science
collection includes approximately 250,000 volumes.
Shops
The Department has well equipped electronics and machine shops
employing electronics technicians, machinists, and a number of
computer systems technicians. A research faculty position is dedicated
half time to maintaining and enhancing Astronomical Computing.
External Facilities
the SMARTS telescopes
SMARTS telescopes
Stony Brook University is one
of the founding members of the
SMARTS consortium. The SMARTS
consortium was organized to keep open and operating the
small
telescopes at the
Cerro Tololo
Interamerican Observatory. The prime source of information about
SMARTS is the
main SMARTS
web page at Yale university.
Ground-Based Observatories
Stony Brook astronomers make regular use of the wide array of
instrumentation available to contemporary astronomy. Stony Brook
faculty and graduate students are frequent users of the facilities of
the
National Optical Astronomy
Observatories such as the
Cerro Tololo Interamerican
Observatory, the
National Radio Astronomy Observatories, the NASA
Infrared Telescope Facility
(IRTF) on Mauna Kea, the
Naval Prototype Optical
Interferometer (NPOI), the
Gemini,
Keck, and
IRAM observatories, the
Combined Array for Research
in Millimeter Astronomy (CARMA), the
Nobeyama 45m telescope, and the
Subaru telescope.
Space Missions
Stony Brook faculty have been principal investigators on programs
using the
Hubble Space
Telescope (HST), the
Chandra
X-ray Observatory,
XMM-Newton
X-ray Observatory,
Herschel telescope and the
Spitzer Space Telescope and
are heavily involved in defining the next generation space missions,
such as
SIM. Faculty
and students routinely use archival data from these and other NASA
missions in the course of their research. Graduate students routinely
participate in analysis of data obtained from these and other
missions, and use these data in the PhD theses.
National Supercomputer Centers
Stony Brook researchers have large allocations of supercomputer time
(several million hours per year) at the
National Energy Research Scientific
Computing Center, the
National Center
for Computational Sciences,
Livermore Computing, and the
NASA Advanced Supercomputing
Division. These computers are used mainly for simulations of
supernovae (Type Ia and II), gamma-ray bursts, and other stellar
explosions.