Scientists make huge dataset of nearby stars available to public
Kind of funny they say they're making the data public... 61,000 raw keck observations should be... ~600 GB?<p>I kind of wonder if they were forced. Most proprietary observations with Keck or Hubble or whatever come with a little caveat that you only get the data for 1 or 2 years before it get's publicized. I'm guessing that running their code on their released data set _after_ they've published is gonna come up with a big fat nothing new. But maybe mixing with dupe detections from RAVE / LAMOST / SDSS / APOGEE (massive spectroscopic surveys free to the public after proprietary times) and running their code might turn up one... highly doubtful though.<p>Anyways, there's loads of huge data sets out there that are free. TGAS-Gaia was free to the public as soon as it was made free to the community, so that's where all the big boys are playing right now (The _really_ big fish are fighting it out with the Gaia-raw, minus the tycho supplement that makes TGAS). This summer Gaia2 is coming out to the public the same time as the community again -- people are already setting up war rooms around the world to hack out papers in week long sprints the day after release.<p>If you're super into planets for some reason, Kepler's been free for years. Google "NASA Mast" for all Nasa data. Google "Vizier CDS" for any European catalog. Gaia has light curves I guess, but it's not good enough yet, I'm pretty sure) If there's a specific telescope you like... like CFHT for example, just google it and they got free data.