Long gone are the days of the lone astronomer perched atop a mountain, peering through an eyepiece at a smudge in the night sky. Modern astronomers, though, still have to go out and get their own data, either spending nights in the telescope's control room or observing remotely.rnBut for the astronomer of 2020, data will automatically come to her before she wakes up in the morning. While she sleeps, telescopes on autopilot will comb the night sky, feeding many terabytes (a thousand billionrnin the data-a colorful three-dimensional cluster of spheres that represent the hundreds of characteristics that describe, for instance, a supernova-analyzing the supernova in ways that would have been inconceivable a mere 10 years earlier.
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