The Pierre Auger Observatory is a large international effort to provide measurements of extensive air showers (EAS) initiated in the upper atmosphere by cosmic rays with energies above 10 eV , the Ultra High Energy Cosmic Rays (UHECR’s). The explanations for the origin, acceleration processes and composition of the UHECR’s face theoretical and experimental difficulties, due to the extremely low...

During the last couple of years, observers have started to make plans for a Virtual Observatory, as a federation of existing data bases, connected through levels of software that enable rapid searches, correlations, and various forms of data mining. We propose to extend the notion of a Virtual Observatory by adding archives of simulations, together with interactive query and visualization capab...

We have enlarged the sample of stars in the planet search at Lick Observatory. Doppler measurements of 82 new stars observed at Lick Observatory, with additional velocities from Keck Observatory, have revealed two new planet candidates. The G3 V/IV star, HD 195019, exhibits Keplerian velocity variations with a period of 18.27 d, an orbital eccentricity of 0.03±0.03, and M sin i = 3.51 MJUP. Bas...

We present NANO, a system that establishes whether performance degradations that services or clients experience are caused by an ISP’s discriminatory policies. To distinguish discrimination from other causes of degradation (e.g., overload, misconfiguration, failure), NANO uses a statistical method to estimate causal effect. NANO aggregates passive measurements from end-hosts, stratifies the mea...

Vibration from equipment mounted on the telescope and in summit support buildings has been a source of performance degradation at existing astronomical observatories, particularly for adaptive optics performance. Rather than relying only on best practices to minimize vibration, we present here a vibration budget that specifies allowable force levels from each source of vibration in the observat...

A team from the University of Washington (UW), the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI), the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), and the Institute for Pacific Ocean Science and Technology (IPOST) of Canada is jointly developing the North East Pacific Time-series Underwater Networked Experiment (NEPTUNE). NEPTUNE is being designed as a long...

We propose a method for in situ measurement of the length of kilometer size Fabry-Perot cavities in laser gravitational wave detectors. The method is based on the vernier, which occurs naturally when the laser incident on the cavity has a sideband. By changing the length of the cavity over several wavelengths we obtain a set of carrier resonances alternating with sideband resonances. From the m...

If clustering of the arrival directions of ultra high energy cosmic rays is discovered, this would provide important information about their origin, composition, and the galactic and extragalactic magnetic fields. We present here the analysis of the autocorrelation function of the data from the Pierre Auger Observatory as a function of the angular scale and the energy threshold. We compare our ...