Abstract deadline for SPIE 2012

[Rob Seaman]

Howdy,

The deadline for SPIE Astronomical Instrumentation 2012 is less than one week away (19 December). Please consider submitting an abstract to "Observatory Operations: Strategies, Processes, and Systems IV", the hottest ticket next Summer in Amsterdam:

	http://spie.org/as107

The Observatory Ops conference at the 2010 SPIE in San Diego featured a strong focus on time domain astronomy.  This has if anything been strengthened for the 2012 meeting and other focus areas of interest to the VOEvent community have been added, including operations topics for the Virtual Observatory and for systems of networked telescopes.  Several names from the Hotwired community should be familiar from the Program Committee.

The future of astronomy over the next several decades will pivot on time domain issues.  It is unnecessary to dwell on the connection of transient response observing modes to this year's Nobel prize in Physics.  Accomplishing the challenging science goals in the time domain will require new infrastructure, new procedures, new systems, new networks.  To be successful, all of these will require a new commitment to coherent operational strategies.  Autonomous technologies such as robotics and semantic technologies such as astroinformatics - and in particular VOEvent and related VO and exo-VO standards such as RTML and SimpleTimeSeries - need to move from the ivory towers to the telescope domes and downtown computer labs.  SPIE in general and the Observatory Operations conference in particular are where creative ideas are brought into the real world.

Please forward far and wide.

Rob Seaman
National Optical Astronomy Observatory
Tucson, AZ
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