A new UNESCO-IAU online Portal to the Heritage of Astronomy has been launched today at the IAU's 28th General Assembly in Beijing, China. The site, which resides at http://www.astronomicalheritage.net, is a dynamic, publicly accessible database, discussion forum and document repository on astronomical heritage sites throughout the world, even if they are not on UNESCO's World Heritage List.

Buildings and monuments relating to astronomy throughout the ages stand as a tribute to the diverse and often complex ways in which people have rationalized the cosmos and framed their actions in accordance with their understanding of it. This includes, but is by no means restricted to, the development of modern science. The importance of the sky in human heritage was recognized by UNESCO when it established its Astronomy and World Heritage Initiative in 2003, and in 2008 it signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the IAU (http://www.astronomy2009.org/news/pressreleases/detail/iya0803/). Since then, the two organizations have been working together to promote astronomical sites of potential "Outstanding Universal Value".

The online portal is the latest and potentially most significant deliverable from the accord set up between UNESCO and the IAU four years ago, and results directly from a collaboration between the IAU's Astronomy and World Heritage Working Group (AWHWG) and the Ancient Skies Project (http://www.ancient-skies.org) set up through the IYA2009 Astronomy and World Heritage Cornerstone Project. Professor Clive Ruggles, Emeritus Professor of Archaeoastronomy at the University of Leicester, UK, is Chair of the AWHWG. He said: "A lot of our most precious astronomical heritage -- both ancient and modern -- is under threat. If we don't act to try to protect and preserve it, we run the risk of losing it. Over the coming months and years this web portal will become 'the' vehicle for actively supporting, as well as sustaining, political and public interest in the promotion and protection of astronomical heritage sites, both cultural and natural."

A previous AWHWG milestone was the Thematic Study on Astronomical Heritage produced in 2010 by the IAU, working together with ICOMOS, UNESCO's advisory body for cultural sites. Endorsed by UNESCO's World Heritage Committee in 2010, the Thematic Study provides guidelines for UNESCO member states on the inscription of astronomical properties. Much of its content has been incorporated onto the portal.

The portal contains:

* a range of general information pages;

* thematic essays and case studies, searchable geographically and temporally using a specially developed "heritage finder" tool; and

* a discussion forum permitting authorized users to discuss current entries, propose additions and changes, propose new heritage entities (case studies), and discuss general issues.

The portal will not only feature sites and monuments, but also other types of astronomical heritage such as portable instruments and intangible cultural practices, as well as dark-sky places.

The database is dynamic, continually subject to update by peer review. For example, members of the AWHWG have been working over the past year to develop nine much more detailed Extended Case Studies which will be brought online after they have been discussed and approved at the IAU General Assembly. Several of them, it is hoped, will be a direct help in stimulating new World Heritage List nominations.

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Launch of UNESCO-IAU Astronomical Heritage Web Portal

Federal budget pressures in the US could force the organization that runs publicly funded observatories to divest itself of six telescopes. The list points to new priorities in astronomy.

For astronomers in the United States it's dj vu with a wrenching twist the possible closure of some of the most heavily used observatories the federal government funds.

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In 1995, the prospect of flat federal science budgets prompted calls to privatize or close workhorses such as the Kitt Peak Observatory near Tuscon, Ariz. That would ease the squeeze on other big-ticket observatory projects in the pipeline, the argument went.

Seventeen years later, telescopes at Kitt Peak, which avoided previous appointments with a broker, are again the budgetary bulls-eye.

This time the fiscal picture is far more bleak, and the projects in the pipeline are more ambitious. Thus, a panel advising the National Science Foundation (NSF) has recommended that the agency writing the checks for publicly supported observatories divest itself of six facilities as quickly as possible over the next four years.

The goal is to ensure enough federal research dollars to allow the US to participate in high-priority observatory projects through the end of the decade and have enough money left to supply research grants astronomers and their grad students need to use the new telescopes.

Aside from Kitt Peak's three largest telescopes, the divest-it list includes a gleaming white, 328-foot-diameter radio telescope at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory's Greenbank, W. Va., facility dedicated 12 years ago and built at a cost of nearly $60 million. Four other scientifically productive telescopes or telescope arrays scopes are on the list as well.

Grappling with the issue wasn't easy, notes Debra Fischer, a Yale University astronomer who served on the advisory panel making the recommendations. Federally funded observatories serve as portals to the universe for a large number of astronomers who don't populate the faculties of universities with fiscal angels or pockets sufficiently deep to build their own observatories.

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Which telescopes could lose out in astronomy's big budget crunch?

Observatories in Britain, France and the United States, a pharaonic temple in Egypt, a 3,000-year-old pillar in China and a 1920s tower in Berlin have been inscribed on a UN-backed heritage list for astronomy, unveiled on Friday.

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UN launches 'Heritage of Astronomy' portal

The online astronomy project - Galaxy Zoo - is searching for Chinese people to help categorize galaxies in the universe. The Zoo, which has no animals but more than one million galaxies, was set up in 2007 by a group of astronomers who found it impossible to classify the numerous galaxies. So they turned to the public and are now seeking help from the Chinese.

"I hope Chinese people will love to see the beautiful pictures of the galaxies as much as we do. I know they have a pretty long history of astronomy," said Karen Masters, leader of the science team of the Galaxy Zoo project and research fellow at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth, in Britain.

She was speaking at the International Astronomical Union (IAU) 28th General Assembly, in Beijing (Aug. 20-31, 2012).

"We live in a universe filled with galaxies with an amazing variety of sizes and shapes," said Masters, who introduced the project and said she was looking forward to having Chinese people join the project to learn more about the universe.

Within 24 hours of its launch five years ago, the website was receiving 70,000 hits an hour, with more than 50 million hits during its first year from almost 150,000 people. Now, more than 655,000 people have registered to help scientific researchers, said Masters, winner of the 2008 IAU Fellowship.

The science team has also published papers using the contributions from the participants of the Zoo.

"It just followed the trend of Internet research," Masters said, talking about the development of the project.

The female scientist, who has Chinese American husband and mother of two, said a Polish and German version of the project exists and is in the process of translating terms into Chinese.

She said, "The Chinese language will help people to better understand the questions on our website. To explore a Chinese version requires native speakers to make sure the term is right in the Chinese language. We hope some astronomers will want to volunteer for the job."

Using galaxy pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, which went into orbit by NASA in 1990, the Zoo allows amateur astronomers to map the obscure corners of the universe and is a citizen science project.

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Astronomy project hunts for Chinese helpers