News & Announcements

HTN Call For Proposals

The Heterogenous Telescope Networks (HTN) group, a consortium of robotic telescope operators and users interested in the benefits of networked observing, are offering a substantial amount of observing time spread across four robotic telescopes for an outstanding observing project of scientific merit that leverages the advantages of automated rapid follow-up. On offer in this call will be 50 hours of scheduled time split between the Faulkes North and Faulkes South telescopes, 10 hours of on-sky time on the Liverpool Telescope and 10 hours of on-sky time on MONET/North on. The call is now open and closes 25 JULY 2008. You can find more details at http://www.telescope-networks.org/cfp/. More about the HTN: http://www.telescope-networks.org

NVO Inside

"NVO Inside" is the idea that the VO is in use by many applications and data providers, not just by those that are branded as part of the official VO efforts. Do you use VO protocols or services? Produce VO content or applications? Does your research have "NVO Inside"? Please let us know!

The VO Inside WorldWide Telescope

Microsoft Research recently released the WorldWide Telescope (WWT) software, which provides seamless access to astronomical data via an advanced interactive interface. The name "WorldWide Telescope" comes from the description by Alex Szalay and Jim Gray in 2002 of a new genre of astronomical research that would recognize and utilize the vast resources that were becoming available on the World Wide Web. As that grid of resources becomes a unified reality with the infrastructure provided by the VO efforts, Microsoft Research and the Space-Time Consortium at Harvard are developing WWT to unify these distributed resources on the astronomer's desktop.

The WWT public beta, released May 2008, brings Terabytes of tiled, multi-resolution “VO data” to the user’s desktop. These data, hosted on Microsoft servers, currently include complete versions of 50 existing sky surveys provided by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Digital Sky Survey at STScI, and SkyView. This current version of WWT also leverages a number of VO technologies to access and display these images. For example, Hubble Space Telescope press release images are downloaded by the WWT using the Simple Image Access VO protocol. Spitzer and Chandra press release images are integrated by adopting the Astronomy Visualization Metadata (AVM) standard, which tags web image types (e.g., JPG, PNG) with metadata such as world coordinate systems. WWT can directly load any AVM tagged image, including those from Spitzer and Chandra, into the composite sky.

WWT’s advanced interactive interface has been designed to give the user continuous feedback regarding where they are looking in the sky and what astronomical objects or interesting data are available there. Maintaining and providing context for the user has been a major focus of WWT development and this “context driven” interface is enhanced with other VO tools. A built-in SIMBAD name resolver, which is a common VO tool, is supplemented by a coordinate position search of the SIMBAD database that allows a user to identify an object in the WWT images via a simple right click. Additional resources available to the user via a right click include literature queries of the NASA ADS or Wikipedia. Since WWT supports the VOTable format, it can understand and present the results of any VO Registry query, and will soon be adding user defined VO searches to the interface.

Future developments include a professional version of the WWT, nicknamed “WWT Pro.” WWT Pro will focus on expanding WWT’s current adoption of VO tools, especially those that allow an astronomer to search for and collect data for their research. Further, the WWT Pro project is looking to connect to the astronomical community in a number of ways. The project is developing a series of “tours” to show how to use the software for science research. These “tours” are a PowerPoint-like WWT feature that provides a simple way for a user to capture, annotate and share their sky exploration. The WWT Pro project is also interested in developing demonstration science projects by hosting large, coherent data sets that can be used to tackle specific research projects. Community donated data, example projects and feedback should be directed to August Muench (gmuench\@/cfa.harvard.edu).

Links:
WorldWide Telescope
Microsoft Research
Space-Time Consortium at Harvard IIC

Featured NVO Applications

VIM: Visual Integration & Mining

VIM is a tool for investigating multiple sources (or sky positions) simultaneously. Each source becomes a row in a table, with catalog, image cutouts, and spectral information drawn from VO-accessible data collections. Proximity searches are performed with respect to catalog entries. For images, cutouts can be generated from the Skyview service, which has all the major image surveys. Spectra are available from SDSS and other surveys. Most of the world's astronomical data is available to VIM, as with any VO application, including primary resources (SDSS, 2MASS, NED, etc), and also the holdings of large data centers such as NASA, CDS, and ESO. You can find these either by keyword or by spatial correlation with your sources.

Sources can be input either by the simple text format "RA, Dec, ID" or by a VOTable file. Such files can be created with other NVO applications, or at places such as HEASARC or Vizier. You can also use a table import wizard to convert text tables to VOTable. When uploading a set of positions, VIM allocates storage space (a "workbench") for the tables of catalog matches and image cutouts that will share that space. The workbench has a URL that you can share with colleagues.

Data are added to your workbench through catalog proximity searches, cutout images, or spectra. You can select from a cache of primary catalogs or use the VO registry system to find and select other catalogs, which can then be added to your cache. Sources can be selected and sorted based on arithmetic predicates, and new columns can be created by arithmetic expression.

As you work with VIM, a transcript of what you have done is created that can be used as a program to reproduce the same workbench or edited to scale up the data retrieval and computing. VIM is part of a suite of integrated data discovery and analysis tools that users will find when using the NVO.

To read about or try out VIM, go to http://us-vo.org/vim - feedback should be directed to .

NVO Calendar

23-27 June 2008 | Euro-VO DCA Workshop on how to publish data in the VO | Garching/München, Germany
This workshop is particularly targetted at participants from astronomical data centres and larger projects in order to provide the knowledge and experience to enable them to publish a range of datasets to the Virtual Observatory (VO).

3-11 September, 2008 | The 2008 NVO Summer School | Santa Fe, New Mexico
In this nine-day, hands-on summer school, participants will work with experienced NVO users and software specialists to become familiar with how to discover, access, visualize, and analyze data with the Virtual Observatory.

5-8 October 2008 | "Astronomical Data and the Virtual Observatory" session at CODATA21 | Kiev, Ukraine
Session Title: Managing Astronomical Data; Lessons learned in the development of virtual observatories. Call for Papers deadline March 31, 2008

27-31 October | IVOA Interoperability | Baltimore, Maryland
The IVOA Interop Meetings are aimed at making significant progress in generating new standards powering the development of the world wide Virtual Observatory initiatives.

2-5 November 2008 | ADASS XVIII | Quebec City, Canada
The Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems (ADASS) conference provides a forum for scientists and programmers concerned with algorithms, software and software systems employed in the acquisition, reduction, analysis, and dissemination of astronomical data.

Contact Information: Your feedback is important to us. To make sure we can address your questions and ideas, please send email to . You may also want to take a look at our Getting Started with NVO page to see if any of your questions are answered there.

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