Astronomy, as many other scientific disciplines, is facing a true data deluge which is bound to change both the praxis and the methodology of every day research work. The emerging field of astroinformatics, while on the one end appears crucial to face the technological challenges, on the other is opening new exciting perspectives for new astronomical discoveries through the implementation of ad...

By observing bright and compact astronomical sources while also taking data with the 183 GHz Water Vapour Radiometers, ALMA will be able to measure the ‘empirical’ relationship between fluctuations in the phase of the astronomical signal and the fluctuations of sky brightness around 183 GHz. Simulations of such measurements assuming only thermal noise in the astronomical and WVR receivers are p...

In the last decades, archaeologists in central Europe have found traces of enigmatic neolithic circular building structures buried in the soil. Recent studies indicate that the orientation of many of their doorways may have been chosen with an astronomical background in mind. This paper explains the use of virtual reconstructions of these buildings from archaeological data, in combination with ...

Relational databases (DBs) are ideal tools to manage bulky and structured data archives. In particular for Astronomy they can be used to fulfill all the requirements of a complex project, i.e. the management of: documents, software (s/w) packages and logs, observation schedules, object catalogues, quick-look, simulated, raw and processed data, etc. All the information gathered in a relational D...

The volume of data generated by modern astronomical telescopes is extremely large and rapidly growing. However, current high-performance data processing architectures/frameworks are not well suited for astronomers because of their limitations and programming difficulties. In this paper, we therefore present OpenCluster, an open-source distributed computing framework to support rapidly developin...

Recently, the digitalization of the astronomical scientific heritage has been considered an important task that can facilitate much researches in astronomy. The creation of digital libraries and databases of astronomical photographic plates brings up the problem of digitalization astronomical logbooks , since the data contained in them is crucial for the usage of the plates . An optical charact...