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?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.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.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.