Project News
From EStar
Rolling Status (via our Twitter Feed)
4th July 2008
WARNING: The LCO offices in Santa Barbara have now shut down their computer network due to rolling blackouts caused by the Gap Fire near Goleta. Expect some impact on the microlensing programme, although observations with the Faulkes telescopes should continue as normal.
13th June 2008
Added OGLE EWS anomaly notification messages and the results of the eSTAR hourly self-check to our Twitter feed.
12th June 2008
WARNING: The Computer Section at the RSAA has just advised of an interruption to the SSO link a on Friday 13th June 2008 between midnight and 6am AEST to permanently fix the fibre that was temporarily repaired after an unscheduled outage on 28th April 2008. We will therefore loose connection to the FTS during this period, other operations should continue without interruption.
11th June 2008
You can now find us on Facebook 
5th April 2008
To go along with the TCP and RSS and KML event feeds, I'd like to point people at the new eSTAR Twitter feed. Right now the feed is only carrying automatically generated tweets alerting you to new transient event messages about Gamma Ray Bursts, Microlensing Events and SNe Candidates. But I'm going to be plumbing Twitter into the heart of the system over the next week or so, soon you'll be able to know not only when interesting things are happening, but also what telescopes are responding to those events, and what they're seeing. All in real time...
Our twitter feed for a real-time event messages 
26th March 2008
We should now be fully operational on the new server stack.
5th March 2008
New version of the OGLE Timeline Widget updated to point at the new event server.
28th February 2008
WARNING: We are currently moving operations to a new server rack. There may be some disruption to user facing status pages, however backend operations should continue uninterrupted. Clients connected to the eSTAR Event Broker need to be pointed to a new host. There will also be a brief 'at risk' period towards on the 25th of March due to a scheduled power outage at our data centre. Please email Alasdair Allan with any queries.
25th September 2007
Uploaded a number of recent talks given by project members this year.
25th August 2007
As a proof-of-concept we have Plastic-enabled Google Sky, more information on our Plastic pages.
23rd August 2007
Following the launch of Google Sky yesterday we spent the afternoon quickly building a mashup so that our real time VOEvent data can be displayed real time inside Google Sky via a KML network link.
This is only at the quick hack stage, but expect a few more KML and Google Sky related bits and pieces from us over the next couple of weeks.
23rd April 2007
A minor bug fix release to the network status Dashboard Widget.
16th February 2007
We have rolled out a live status page optimised for browsing on a PDA or a smart phone. The site has not been exhaustively tested on different platforms and we'd appreciate an email if it displays particularly well or poorly on your handheld device.
1st November 2006
Building on our release of an OGLE Event Timeline page earlier in the year, we have now built a similar interface into the SDSS Event Timeline as part of the project's work on event visualisation. At the top of the page is an event timeline, with two independently scrollable bars (the upper in days, the lower in months), which you can click and then drag to show previous events. The SDSS event data is also displayed normally in table form below the timeline interface. Comments are invited from the community.
The Timeline Interface is an HTML-based AJAX widget for visualizing time-based events and is sponsored by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is maintained by, and copyright of, the SIMILE project.
27th October 2006
The FTP problems, which did indeed turn out to be related to the Exeter firewall, have now been resolved. Normal service has now been resumed.
26th October 2006
We have an FTP problem, probably due to the local firewall at Exeter, that is causing the raw network status file to be truncated. This will cause the network status web page to hang, the status widget will load, but not display any data.
We're presuming that the same issue will halt the automatic archiving of incoming VOEvent messages to our online archive, but no messages have yet been dropped at this stage. We're currently trying to resolve this issue. Actual observing programmes should not be affected.
18th October 2006
A major update to the Plastic Monitor Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X Tiger, which should fix all of the display problems of the previous release.
15th October 2006
We would like to announce the fourth Apple Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X Tiger from the eSTAR project. This is the first of several widgets to come out of our work on the VOTech Plastic protocol. However, this widget is an pre-alpha release which still has some bugs in the window rendering code, and relies in part on the undocumented HTTP GET interface of the AG Plastic Hub. Expect an update to fix some, but not all of the bugs within a few days.
4th September 2006
We are back online after estar3.astro.ex.ac.uk was rebooted this morning. Right now we're looking at the logs to try and figure out what went wrong, so we can at least make sure it doesn't happen again.
We would also like to announce the third Apple Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X Tiger from the eSTAR project. This is a widget-ised version of our OGLE Event Timeline page an is part of the project's work on event visualisation. There are still some problems with the rendering of the information windows, so this is very much alpha level code.
2nd September 2006
The DNS problems have now be resolved, however sometime this afternoon estar3.astro.ex.ac.uk (a.k.a vo.astro.ex.ac.uk) seems to have gone offline. This is the box that runs the Robonet-1.0 exo-planet programme, and serves as our connection onto the VOEvent backbone. The GRB programme on UKIRT is unaffected as it runs on estar2.astro.ex.ac.uk.
Apologies for the outage, hopefully we'll be back on line tomorrow, however I'm currently in transit to Strasbourg and therefore can't make my way into the office to diagnose the problem, so it's possible that we may be down until Monday.
31st August 2006
There are currently some DNS problems at Exeter which may cause problems with some of the eSTAR network telemetry and status monitoring systems, for instance the network status pages. However it should not have any effect on the eSTAR network itself and observations will be scheduled as normal.
30th August 2006
We would also like to announce the initial release of the second Apple Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X Tiger from the eSTAR project. The widget allows you to track the status of the Robonet-1.0 telescopes in real time. More functionality will be added to the widget in next couple of weeks to allow you access to further system and weather information at each of the telescope sites.
Update: There are still some bugs with the widget in the mapping of the pointing and rotator position which I'm currently trying to resolve.
10th August 2006
A maintenance update for the network status Dashboard Widget. This fixes problems with status display introduced by back-end changes to telemetry files for the network. Unfortunately these changes breaks previous versions of the widget. Apologies for any inconvenience caused.
31st July 2006
The project has rolled out an open beta-release of the OGLE Event Timeline page. This interface is part of the project's work on event visualisation. At the top of the page is an event timeline, with two independently scrollable bars (the upper in days, the lower in months), which you can click and then drag to show previous events. The OGLE event data is also displayed normally in table form below the timeline interface. Comments are invited from the community.
The Timeline Interface is an HTML-based AJAX widget for visualizing time-based events and is sponsored by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and is maintained by, and copyright of, the SIMILE project.
20th July 2006
Another minor bug fix release to the network status Dashboard Widget. This should fix some display problems which turn up when there are actual problems on the network. Every cloud has a silver lining.
29th June 2006
A new minor version of the network status Dashboard Widget has been released, this should fix the following reported problems:
- External URLs should now open in the default browser rather than the widget pane in all cases.
- The pop-up window which appears when you mouse over a map pin no longer obscures any of the network telescopes pins.
27th June 2006
The network status pages have been updated, and real time information for the exo-planet 
and GRB observing programmes is now available to registered users. We would also like to announce the initial release of an Apple Dashboard Widget for Mac OS X Tiger that will allow you to track the real time status of the eSTAR network from your own machine.
19th June 2006
In collaboration with Thinking Telescope Project (RAPTOR) at LANL, the eSTAR project has rolled out a closed beta-release of a manual injection system for VOEvent messages. This service allows users to easily build VOEvent messages from a generic templates, and then inject these messages directly onto the backbone event network. The service is currently restricted to registered users only, if you want to request an username and password for the service please email Alasdair Allan with your full name, preferred contact email and phone number and your institutional/project affiliation.
15th June 2006
The first ever autonomous observation triggered by a VOEvent message took place today at around 18:00 BST. An OGLE EWS message arrived at the eSTAR broker and was translated into a VOEvent message, which was then distributed in real time around the world over the emerging event network.
The event message was then picked by remote client software which was listening in on the event feed. It was parsed, analyzed, and evaluated. The client software made the decision that it was a valid event and made a request for follow-up observations of the user agent running the exo planet science programme. The agent immediately forwarded the request, and the observations were then queued up at one of the Robonet-1.0 telescopes.
We have therefore, for the first time ever, closed the loop for autonomous observations based on the VO's new VOEvent event messaging standard.