SPIE Astronomical Instrumentation 2010

[Rob Seaman]

SPIE Astronomical Instrumentation is upcoming in San Diego from 27 June - 2 July 2010.  The time domain will be highlighted at the Observatory Operations conference (see below):

	http://www.spie.org/as107

We (both the conference OC and the VOEvent WG) are especially interested in encouraging contributions to the program from the VO and robotic telescope (and related) communities.  Those who have attended before know that the biennial SPIE Instrumentation meeting is the key gathering of those clans of astronomers and engineers who get their hands dirty building the unprecedented observational infrastructure that will be used to reveal fundamental truths about our universe.

Programmers reading this should also be aware of the "Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy" and "Modeling, Systems Engineering and Project Management" conferences, nicely complementary to ADASS and IVOA sessions.  Plenty of hardware gizmos, too - this is the sort of meeting where you can walk around and under full size mockups of the James Webb Space Telescope:

	http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2007/spie.html

The location of this SPIE meeting in San Diego makes it especially accessible to our Left Coast brethren (and sistren) - and perhaps especially desirable for travelers from the chilly East.

The OC is having a telecon on Friday.  I'd appreciate having a sense by then for some of the abstracts the VOEvent WG (and broader IVOA) might be planning to submit.  For comparison, the program for the Orlando meeting in 2006 is at http://spie.org/x3111.xml - we had a half day at that meeting on VOEvent related topics.  It would be great to fill an entire day this time around with transient response / robotic / target-of-opportunity / autonomous astronomy / virtual-actual observatory talks and perhaps another half day or so on synoptic surveys.

Did I mention that SPIE is a great opportunity to network with senior decision-makers in astronomy?  The theme for the 2010 meeting is "Observational Frontiers of Astronomy for the New Decade", which is to say that this is where & when the Decadal Survey (http://sites.nationalacademies.org/bpa/BPA_049810) turns into something more than a pile of paper projects.

The abstract deadline is 14 December.

Please share this announcement!

Rob
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> A special focus of this conference will be the rising support challenge of time-domain investigations. Demand for such support is steadily increasing, driven by the desire to study rare, random events as well as long-term, synoptic phenomena. Such studies are particularly challenging when they require coordination, often unpredictable, between multiple space and ground based observatories. While this trend has recently been driven by space-based detections of gamma ray bursts, the startup of ground-based time-domain survey facilities (e.g. Palomar Transit Factory, Pan-STARRS, LSST) will quickly take this challenge to a new level.