Motivation
The Navy Precision Optical Interferometer (NPOI) is the largest optical Interferometer in the world. The NPOI is an astronomical long-baseline optical interferometer that has been in operation in Anderson Mesa since 1994. This NPOI dashboard web application is sponsored by Jim Clark from the Navy Precision Optical Interferometer Naval Research Laboratory, Remote Sensing Division as well as Adam Schilperoort who is a software engineer at Lowell Observatory. This dashboard will provide valuable information to observers at Lowell and researchers at NPOI. Observers and researchers will be able to use a web system in which they would be able to interact with graphs of star data relevant to building a better understanding of the space we seek to explore and travel through in the future.
NPOI and Lowell Observatory work together because of their common interest in space research and collecting data to better understand binary systems. The shared data comes from an array of six mirrors spaced tens of meters apart to gather data rather than a single telescope, and is so large because it combines star light collected to form a high resolution aperture. NPOI currently collects 3 major pieces of data; instrument data ( temperature, humidity, and pressure), observational (date, time, and operator), and pipeline data (condensed text format of the collected data). The collected data is invaluable to inform instrument health, performance, and other diagnostic data. As, it remains unusable to administrators, engineers, observers, and researchers alike because this data is so dense and time consuming to parse. Also the location of the data is spread across different machines as well as on directory trees across the network. Making it difficult and sluggish to analyze.
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