DISCCOVER

Data Collection for the Sloan Digital Sky Survey --- A Network Flow Heuristic

Short Description

DISCCOVER is a program for a Euclidean capacitated sphere-covering problem.

Contact

Neal Young
Dartmouth College
Hanover
NH 03755
USA

email: neal.young@dartmouth.edu

World Wide Web

Neal Young

DISCCOVER

Description

We wrote a program that will be used in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey to minimize the data-collection cost of the second phase of the Survey. The problem solved is the following: given a collection of points on the unit sphere, a radius R (small) and a capacity C (say 600), choose a small set of (arbitrary) points on the sphere such that every given point can be assigned to a chosen point within R units with no chosen point being assigned more than C given points. Given points represent galaxies, chosen points represent centers of telescope snapshots. Data for up to 600 galaxies can be gathered in each snapshot.