Surveys, Catalogues, Databases, and Archives of Astronomical Data

This chapter traces the development of astronomical observational methods from visual, for decades tracking the behavior of individual objects, to modern space missions that produce data simultaneously for several hundred thousand objects in different spectral ranges. Thanks to this, astronomy has moved from the study of individual objects to the study of the universe as a whole and has become the science of Big Data. The chapter describes briefly visual, photographic, and CCD surveys of stars, galaxies and the intergalactic medium, spectral photographic and spectral CCD surveys, and multiwavelength ground-based and space-born databases and archives, which made it possible to create a high-precision coordinate system, to discover new properties of celestial bodies, and, as a result, to construct three-dimensional models of the visible parts of the universe. We mention also the “conserved” data of photographic astroplates accumulated over the centuries, which have been actively digitized during the last decades and provide a new knowledge from the comparative analysis of old and new observational material. Astronomy research is changing from being hypothesis-driven to being data-driven to being data-intensive. To cope with the various challenges and opportunities offered by the exponential growth of astronomical data volumes, rates, and complexity, the new disciplines of astrostatistics and astroinformatics have emerged.