A particular interest of mine from his post is that compressed sensing could resolves bandwidth problems in astronomy and consequential sequential analysis on astronomical data (streaming data analysis). Overall, his list of applications at the end may enlighten scientists probing the sky with different waveband telescopes.
First, there is the physical model, which could mean either our understanding of what processes operate on a source (the physics part, usually involving PDEs), or the mathematical function that describes the emission as a function of observables like location, time, or energy (the astronomy part, usually the shape of the spectrum, or the time evolution in a light curve, etc.)
The data model on the other hand describes the organization of the observation. It is this which tells us that there is a fundamental difference between an effective area and a response matrix, and conversely, that the point spread function and the line response function are the same beast. This kind of thing, which I suppose is a computer science oriented view of the contents of a file, is crucial for implementing and running something like the Virtual Observatory.
]]>XEphem : http://www.clearskyinstitute.com/xephem/
Celestia : http://www.shatters.net/celestia/
Stellarium : http://www.stellarium.org/
There are many more, of varying degrees of usefulness, user friendliness, and price. Your mileage will vary. But for sheer wow factor, hard to beat Celestia.
[Update 10/01]: The e-Astronomer considers how Google Sky could become more useful. Some interesting tie-ins to Virtual Observatory concepts.
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