What Is Astronomical Markup Language (AML)?

It's no secret that the universe is a prominent, big place. It holds a plethora of secrets that we are amazed by. Yet we have found an anomaly out of the vast universe, and here's what we could pull up. It's also no secret that astronomers look pretty good at it. So, what happens when these two facts collide? Astronomical Markup Language (AML) is an XML-based standard for recording and transmitting astronomical observations and information. It aims to be a standard exchange format for metadata in astronomy, so if you've ever wondered how your favorite astronomer got those beautiful pictures of Saturn or the Milky Way or whatever else they're always taking pictures of, now you know! The AML code is simple enough to learn and yet powerful enough to hold your data securely and reliably. This means you can keep track of all those important discoveries without worrying about losing them in a cloud service outage or accidentally deleting them from your phone. AML is a file format that allows you to describe the contents of an AML document. It's like regular old XML, except it's got a lot more stuff. That stuff includes meta-data about the document itself, like its title, author, and version number; it also provides information about the objects it contains, like their type (i.e., whether they're a table or a list) and their name. The AML documents can be linked to each other through this meta-data block so that when you open one up in a program like Google Sheets, it will automatically know what other docs are related to this one and where to find them! In addition to storing all this info in plain text files, AML also supports encryption and digital signatures so that only authorized users can see sensitive information like credit card numbers or bank account numbers!