Cloud-based e-Infrastructure for scheduling astronomical observations

Abstract

Gravitational microlensing exploits a transient phenomenon where an observed star is brightened due to deflection of its light by the gravity of an intervening foreground star. It is conjectured that this technique can be used to measure the abundance of planets throughout the Milky Way. In order to undertake efficient gravitational microlensing an observation schedule must be constructed such that various targets are observed while undergoing a microlensing event. In this paper, we propose a cloud-based e-Infrastructure that currently supports four methods to compute candidate schedules via the application of local search and probabilistic meta-heuristics. We then validate the feasibility of the e-Infrastructure by evaluating the methods on historic data. The experiments demonstrate that the use of on-demand cloud resources for the e-Infrastructure can allow better schedules to be found more rapidly.