Astronomy Group Facilities

Below is a summary of the various facilities members of the Astronomy group use in their research. Students working in the group have acess to all of these.

Local Facilities

Computer Facilities


WOPR cluster
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 14 inch telescope in a dome on the roof of our building. This telescope is equipped with a SBIG-6 CCD camera. It is computer controlled, has an autoguider, and can be operated from a warmroom. It is currently used for graduate and undergraduate research projects, as well as for instruction 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

SMARTS telescopes
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, and radio and millimeter wave observatories world-wide.

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, 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.

Updated 09-Nov-2007