A while back I wrote about our efforts to ensure that every observation taken by a public user of our telescope network has a permanent web presence. As well as providing a page for each observation with relevant information, it allowed people to browse through the tens of thousands of observations by user and by telescope. Today, along with the update to our main site, we're providing some extra ways to browse and search the public observations.
The first idea we had was to let people browse observations by type of astronomical object. Perhaps you want to find nice pictures of spiral galaxies for a school report, find a picture of an HII region for a public lecture, or monitor asteroids. Given the increasing number of observations being taken on our network it would be impractical to categorize everything by hand so we needed a way to do it automatically. The most straightforward way was to make use of the title that each observer gives to their observation. When we create a page for an observation we check the name against astronomical databases and find the object type (if known). This method isn't always perfect but it seems to work in most cases*. The result is that you can look for observations by a range of categories.
Next up for an overhaul was search. Until now you've only been able to search for observations within a date range, by telescope, by wavelength filter or by title. That's good but we knew we could do more. We've improved the observation search form to allow you to do a cone search (a search around a particular position on the sky), search by user name and also by category of astronomical object. Search results can also be returned in JSON, RSS or even as a slideshow. With these improvements we can do more interesting things such as create a heat map showing where all the observations have been in the past month.
These improvements should make it easier for everyone to explore our archives and start doing their own investigations using the full archive of public observations.
* If you're a user of the real-time interface you can help out by assigning accurate names to your observations.