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Comment by themgt | Hacker News Reader

> If we put half the energy we use up arguing about Oumuamua into detecting more interstellar objects we would have the data to end this debate

This HN comment was just the motivation I needed to get off my computer and rededicate myself to polishing eighteen 1.32m gold-plated beryllium hexagonal mirror segments.

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I know you are joking, but a second interstellar object after the Oumuamua was discovered using a 0.65m DIY telescope built by Gennadiy Borisov.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2I/Borisov

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2I/Borisov

You don't need the telescope. There is an effort to discover interstellar objects in old data, which is largely a matter of spotting faint objects and calculating thier orbits...ie coding.

Can you link us to where we can contribute?

https://panstarrs.stsci.edu/

The data is there. Have at it.

Perfect task for AI.

Given this comment, I'm not sure you know what "AI" or "perfect" mean.

You know what, maybe if we put this data on the blockchain, the ICO can pay for future investment to democratize astronomical research ok, I can't keep typing this out, I can't tell if I'm making myself laugh or cry.

Why would this not be a good domain for image recognition?

If you’re trying to classify images as whether or not they contain something, you need a bunch of images that you already know don’t contain the thing (got it), and a bunch of images that you already know /do/ contain the thing. We lack the latter, so there’s nothing for the algorithm to learn based on.

Oh I see I assumed the GP was talking about after such a dataset I agree you likely couldn't bootstrap without a lot of data but couldn't you use more classic approaches to extract data and then train a model (obviously once you know the extraction process is fool proof?)

But this is not the only way you can deploy machine learning techniques. You could deploy unsupervised learning to first learn what visual features are common in such images, and then successively refine until you end up with a set of images containing very rare phenomena. That could give human evaluators then a considerable head start.

In fact, this idea seems so obvious that it must have been tried already…

Has it? I'm very interested in using data science for astronomy as it was my childhood passion and I'd love to read anything you can provide.

I'm sorry, this was pure speculation on my part, I don't have actual knowledge of this happening.

Thank you for sharing that. Are you sure you know what "not sure" means?

Another place: you could get in touch with the folks at ALeRCE (http://alerce.science/). They publish access to a live stream of data from the ZTF project. We found the closest asteroid ever 4 days ago from the ZTF data stream: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/ztf-finds-closest-known-a...

What is used, and how long does doing that take?

I think it was sarcasm.

Still interesting what would be used to polish a gold plated beryllium mirror. For instance, looks like they clean it by spraying CO2 snow: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_cleaning

Yeah, I took a gamble.

Just looked at the reference you dropped. Thanks, that is an interesting little rabbit hole.

Be very careful grinding, polishing or otherwise ablating any alloy that contains beryllium. Berylliosis (no matter if acute or cronic) is no joke.

Given a budget of, say, $9.66 Billion, I'd say it would take around 25 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Webb_Space_Telescope

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