AS14940 — LIGO-HANFORD-OBSERVATORY

AS14940 announces 1 IPv4 prefixes covering 1,024 addresses and 0 IPv6 prefixes.

About this network

The handle names one observatory and the registrant names the other.

What it's used for

• A gravitational wave observatory's network. 1,024 addresses in a single IPv4 prefix, with one observed BGP neighbour and no IPv6 announced.

Notable

• The AS handle is LIGO-HANFORD-OBSERVATORY while the registrant on the block is LIGO Livingston Observatory.
• The netname repeats the handle exactly, so two of the three fields name one site and the third names a different one.
• The whole footprint is 199.188.184.0/22.
• Three addresses were queried for reverse DNS and none returned a name.

Interesting

• The two names belong to the pair of detectors that make this instrument work. A gravitational wave is confirmed by seeing the same disturbance at both sites, thousands of kilometres apart, within a few thousandths of a second, so neither one means anything alone. The registry records that pairing by accident, with one site's paperwork carrying the other's name.
• Someone filing for a second observatory reused the first record and changed only the field they had to. It is the same mistake as any copied form, made by an organisation whose day job is measuring distance to a fraction of the width of a proton.
• One upstream fits a facility whose data goes to a small number of computing centres over research networks rather than to the public.
• Nothing published in reverse DNS is normal for scientific instruments, which are reached by the people who run them and nobody else.

This description is AI-generated, best-effort context — not authoritative, and provided without any guarantee of accuracy.

Announced prefixes

• 199.188.184.0/22

Upstream networks

• AS23265 Pocketinet Communications, Inc

Adjacent networks

• AS23265 Pocketinet Communications, Inc