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Comment by WD-42 | Hacker News Reader

If any of you are interested in some of the software that made this discovery possible, check out two of the papers from Las Cumbres Observatory:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/natu...

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/aa910f/m...

We run a network of 20 telescopes that are triggered remotely (mostly via API). Because of our ability to schedule observations quickly, we were the only ones able to observe the peak luminosity of the kilonova.

Disclosure: I am a software engineer at LCO.

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How did you get this job?

I studied astrophysics, but I mainly try to lure people into clicking on ads these days, when I am not doing consulting.

Random internet browsing! I have a previous interest in astronomy and I stumbled upon our website, which had a jobs page. They were looking for someone with Django experience.

The field has an increasingly large demand for people with software engineering experience due to the complexity of modern observatories, instrumentation and data analysis. It's only going to grow from here. The problem is competing with SV, which tends to be a black hole for talented software engineers.

Just curious, do you mean that SV's a dead end for talented software engineers? or just that it tracts most of them?

I think the meaning implied is in terms of quality of work. Even the best Silicon Valley company you might join, the big ones that pay well, will largely have you parsing xmls or other mundane programming ritual done and demonstrated to death.

Controlling telescopes, photographing once in a billion year astronomical events obviously has its coolness factor associated with it.

It tracts most of them. We can't really compete on the salary, benefits or programmer community/culture that is available in the bay area. You also are unlike to get rich in an industry that relies mostly on grants. What we do offer is meaningful work. The upside is we attract more motivated, idealistic people that tend to produce amazing work.

what is SV?

Silicon Valley (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Valley)

I work for the NRAO and concur with WD-42: there are more positions than software developers. The main problem is finding people who can withstand our sadistic hiring process and then not laugh when we tell them the salary and where you will live. :)

Dunno about the salary and location, but the hiring process sounds fixable. :-/

>where you will live. :)

So i can't work remotely to avoid working remotely?

So where is it? I don't know if you noticed, but this thread is chock full of people who might be interested. I'm looking for a retirement job.

http://jobs.jobvite.com/nrao/jobs

Given that GRBs have been detected for a long time and thought to have been a result of neutron star mergers, has a GRB detection ever led to an optical light detection of such a merger before? Is the news here that gravitational wave detection allowed us to see neutron star mergers optically or that they simply coincided with detections of the previously seen optical and gamma ray events?

Yes, there have been optical counterparts to GRBs before. What is news here is the first optical counterpart to a gravitational wave detection, along with a GRB, which gives us the strongest evidence yet that these are neutron star mergers.

Is there any new information gained from the optical observations in this particular instance? Did the initial gravitational wave detection allow us to capture the optical counterpart at an earlier stage than normal and therefore get more information as a result?

Yes, absolutely. This wasn't a very large gamma ray burst - as far as I know it may have not been followed up at all. GRBs are hard to localize - but the detection of the gravitational wave made it possible to search for the source quickly in a much smaller area of the sky. This got a lot of people looking, and a lot of good data collected.

There will be more info on this and the possibility of observing it (Via Fermi), but those papers haven't been released yet.

Yes, in around 1997 I believe.

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v396/n6708/full/396233a...

My read is that the news here is that this is the first visual counterpart to a gravitational wave detection. (It's also very strong supporting evidence for the leading theory that neutron stars merging are sources of those gravitational waves.)

Hi! I've been working on a project that's similar to what LCO does, but uses existing amateur telescopes rather than deploying its own. My goal is to reap similar network benefits, and make astronomy more affordable and accessible for everyone.

Would you be open to talking about this project? I'd love to hear an insider's perspective on things, and poke at how my project could be most helpful/useful to astronomers.

robby@freerobby.com

http://astroswarm.com/

Thanks Robby

I like this idea. Sending you an email with some questions shortly.

Thanks for your work! I live in Santa Barbara and love the Astronomy On Tap events you guys put together. It's very cool what you have enabled astronomers across the world to do, and it's even better that you give back to the community and get people excited about space. Keep it up!

Thanks for the kind words! See you at the next AOT.

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