
NASA Data Portal - JohnHammersley
https://data.nasa.gov
======
jheriko
having been working with various astronomical data for years now there are a
lot of good sources out there. some of my favourites:

[https://pds.nasa.gov/](https://pds.nasa.gov/) \- planetary data service has a
lot of data collected from space missions if you are willing to poke around,
use some funky tools and maybe even port awful non-standard C or fortran code
from the 70s to read files :P

[http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR](http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-
bin/VizieR) \- a huge collection of catalogues of stars, galaxies and other
things that can be searched and browsed.

[http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?horizons](http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/?horizons) \- a
great source of planetary, cometary and other ephemerides, with e-mail and
telnet interfaces that are surprisingly convenient.

[http://pds-geosciences.wustl.edu/missions/venera/](http://pds-
geosciences.wustl.edu/missions/venera/) \- a small selection of data from the
russian venera program - a bit of a special case - but i've not found much of
this data available (online at least - offline is something else :P)

its a bit of a shame that the fortran friendly file format still seems to the
the most popular way to store this kind of data... but its easy to parse
thankfully :)

~~~
cyphar
> its a bit of a shame that the fortran friendly file format still seems to
> the the most popular way to store this kind of data... but its easy to parse

Haha, don't get me started on FITS files. It's essentially impossible to
analyse big postage stamps because you need to load the entire FITS file (and
array) into memory. It's annoying that this is the standard we use.

> [http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/VizieR](http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-
> bin/VizieR) \- a huge collection of catalogues of stars, galaxies and other
> things that can be searched and browsed.

SIMBAD (also from that site) is incredible for cross-referencing and finding
references for indexed bodies. I used it quite a lot while I was doing astro
research.

~~~
LeoPanthera
I used to work in IT at a place where FITS was the standard image format. Made
me want to tear my hair out daily.

ImageMagick supports FITS, and will happily convert it to PNG or some other
rational format. (It will make FITS files too, if you're feeling masochistic.)

~~~
cyphar
Problem is that you need to have the actual photon counts. NASA (for Kepler at
least) uses FITS files to store essentially a 2d array of photon counts. So
converting to another format is not actually helpful.

But I agree that if someone is using it as an _image_ format they should
reconsider their life decisions.

~~~
LeoPanthera
Sure, but for generating a quick thumbnail, it works just fine.

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qopp
Also check out this which has many of the datasets that NASA has for earth
facing satellites:

[https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/](https://worldview.earthdata.nasa.gov/)

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0xTJ
I really wish that more research was published in a free and open place
online; I think it would really help with the freedom of information.

