Features


Work with Physical Models

Define your model in physical units (e.g. temperature, surface gravity, luminosity, distance) for any range of wavelengths and resolution. Trillian will pass it through each available instrument and determine what it would look like as observed by that telescope.

Scalable

From the beginning, Trillian is designed to scale smoothly with the addition of new data. Because data storage and computation is distributed from the beginning, expanding the platform to use cloud services such as Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, or even spare disk space or CPU cycles in a department server will be straightforward.

Distributed Data Storage

Data will be distributed across multiple institutions to accommodate as many sources of information as possible. Have 1, 2, or 10TB to contribute? Just register it with Trillian, and the system will handle the rest.

Logical Data Access

Data will be distributed based on position in the sky rather than wavelength. Data “units” will be based on the Healpix grid system, with each one containing measurements at all wavelengths available. Thus, all information related to a particular object in the sky is in one location.

Open Source Development

All code related to Trillian will be open source from the beginning, located in this GitHub repository. Contributions are welcome equally from astronomers and developers who are interested in pushing forward what we can do with science research, data, and computing. No science background necessary!

Public API to Astronomical Data

As one component of Trillian is to store large amounts of data, this provides an opportunity for data access through a streamlined, consistent application programming interface. This API will be made public as part of this project.