downloading the sky

the year is 2007 and I'm sitting at home drinking a cup of tea and observing a galaxy millioins of light-year away . No I don't have a fortune in cutting edge astronomical instruments, just a personal computer and reasonably fast internet connection.
Scattered across the screen is a handful of images, each showing that same galaxy but a different wavelength. The visible- light image a 5-year old photo from the twinKeck telescope on mauna kea in Hawaii show the classic galactic pinwheel, spiral arms-twisting out from a dense, starry center .In the infra-red image captured just a few seconds above by a mountain-top telescope inArizona, the galaxy looks more like a series of concentric rings, the telltale signs of dust -filled regions where stars are born.A radio image from a space , based telescope also shows a bright ring, but in this case it signifies the energy thrown of by ossby countless exploding stars. Seen in theX-ray portion of the spectrum, the galaxyies ' rings are completely lost , replaced by a bright central core probably a black hole.
As I SUPERIMPOSE THE DIFFERENT IMAGES i SPORT SOMETHINGpeculiar : A faint , curved wisp of infra-red gas next to a bright x-ray star. Zooming in, I realize that the shock wave from supernova explosion has smashed into a gas cloud and triggered the formation of a batch of babystar. My fingers tremble as a dash off a message to order up a new set of images...It's all a dream now . Unfortunately. when I pore over data on my computer nowa days , even at work, Isee the same information I've been chewing over for week or weeks or months. Now instant access to new data , now effortless comparing of multiple views of the universe through all those other images may exist in the public domain, they "restore away in vast data basesat research institutions around the world, locked up in computer that speak different languages,use different data-storage formats and even identify the same celestial bodies by different names getting those images takes days or weeks of fiddling and analysis -no astronomer can pull all those streams of data together in a easy way.

Soon , though, we'll be able to . An international collaboration the astronomers and computer scintists is now piecing together the means to connect all those dispersed stores of data-many trillions of bytes'worth ,collected over the last several decades by hundereds of ground-based and orbiting observatories in thousands of archives.their efforts will create , in effect ,the world's biggest and best telescope .known as the Virtual Obesrvatory , or VO,it will allow astonomers,as well as students and the general public,to easily locate and download research data over the internet.