News & Announcements

A New NVO Web Page and Data Discovery Tools

We are pleased to announce that the NVO web page has been redesigned and has new and—we hope!—obvious links to a number of astronomer-friendly tools for data discovery and exploration. Our goal has been to make the NVO website a place where you can directly find useful tools and get something done. We encourage feedback and suggestions for further updates and improvements.

The new web page provides links to the following NVO tools:
• The Directory, where keyword-based searches can help you find data collections and data services of interest.
• Simple Query, where standard VO services can be searched by using an object name or a position on the sky.
• Inventory, where hundreds of catalogs are checked for entries which are near your objects of interest.
• Datascope, where images and tables are found and displayed by using an object name or position.
• VIM, the Visual Integration and Mining tool, where a list of objects can be uploaded, and images, spectra, and catalog entries with matching positions can be collected.
• VO-CLI, the VO Command Line Interface, where standard VO services can be invoked in command line mode and combined into powerful scripts.
• Table Tools, which have utilities for converting text tables into standard VOTables and which provide viewing, sorting, and filtering table contents.

In addition, we provide a link to a number of NVO applications that may already be familiar to you, such as Open SkyQuery, WCS Fixer, WESIX, VOEvent, VO Spectrum Services, and VO Footprint Services. We have also improved the on-line help facilities with numerous examples and science use cases, and a new Discovery Wizard to help you determine which tools are most useful for your particular research needs.

Our new home page has a simplified design and a set of icons that we hope will help users identify frequently used tools and understand how the tools can be used together. General background information on NVO and the VO in general remains accessible if you follow the general navigation links, such as what is the NVO, the frequently asked questions, behind the scenes, and the documents collection. We also provide a link to the NVO book, which is based on the NVO Summer Schools and gives extensive background on NVO services and how to use them.

Visit us at http://www.us-vo.org and please, let us know what you think!

Other News

Recent posts on the new NVO website's newsfeed:

• NVO in the News: SPIE Newsroom
• NVO in the News: Boulder Daily Camera
  

NVO Inside

"NVO Inside" describes the fact that that the VO services and tools are being used 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!

NVO Summer School

The fourth NVO Summer School was held in Santa Fe, New Mexico from September 3 through September 11, 2008. This program introduced a broad range of scientists and developers to the opportunities for astronomical research opened by the development of the Virtual Observatory. While there is still much development ongoing and planned in the US National Virtual Observatory program and other VO efforts worldwide, the VO already provides a rich suite of software and data resources.

Forty-six students attended the school, including 19 students from foreign institutions. The attendees included both scientists and developers. The astronomers who attended this summer school stated in oral and written comments that they anticipated the VO playing a significant role in their future research, and that they would be using what they had learned here.

As in previous summer schools, the program was geared towards ensuring that participants were involved in a student project during the last few days of the school. Student projects made extensive use of the VO software tools including the summer school library. A number of the student projects gave new access to major data resources.

At the end of the school when these projects were presented, the faculty presented awards to the five best projects. Winning projects received financial support to attend and present their work at the January 2009 AAS meeting in Long Beach, California. The following is a list of the winning projects. (Abstracts for the projects can be found on the NVO news page.)

Grand Prize: Measuring extinction and extinction-distance relation near the galactic plane
Silvana Navarro, Kristen Larson

Science Prize: NaD as a (useful) stellar population indicator in galaxies
Marcel Bergmann, Bo Milvang-Jensen

Education Prize: Education Stellar Tools for the NVO
Katy Garmany, Brian Nord, Kathy Eastwood, Ken Mighell, Kristen Larson

Technology First Prize: Google Sky Overlay Automation using VO Tools
Jared Crossley, Ron DuPlain

Technology Second Prize: QSOs Photometric Redshift Determination
Raffaele D'Abrusco, Omar Laurino, Pragyasmita Nayak, Geert Barentsen

Feedback from the students was very positive. Here are some quotes from a survey taken after the school:

"With the increasing complexity and volume of information, the NVO may very well be the mechanism that permits some of the most important large-scale discoveries."

"The classes in the summer school are very practical and useful to my research."

"The interaction I had with students and faculty was fruitful, insightful, delightful."

"I've found the whole experience fully engaging and have given serious consideration to redirecting my PhD work towards making more use of the VO."

"... an overall intense experience in terms of learning, networking, and collaboration."

NVO Calendar

30 March - 2 April, 2009 | Euro-VO Virtual Observatory School | Garching bei Munchen, Germany
The goals of the School are to expose European astronomers to the variety of VO tools and services available today so that they can use them efficiently for their own research.

26-30 April, 2009 | Hotwiring the Transient Universe 2 | Santa Cruz, California
The astronomical time domain ranges from solar physics and solar system objects to objects and processes at galactic and cosmological distances. Transients arrive via electromagnetic radiation, gravitational waves, neutrinos and other particles. Discoveries are made via spacecraft and by ground-based surveys, through automatic pipelines and the Virtual Observatory, with robotic telescopes and by the human eye. A strong interdisciplinary agenda for this workshop will engage the emerging information infrastructure for astronomical transient events and their rapid follow-up. *Registration Deadline: April 1

18-20 May, 2009 | Workshop on Robotic Autonomous Observatories | Los Álamos, Torremolinos (Málaga), Spain
The number of automatic astronomical facilities worldwide continues to grow, and the level of robotisation, autonomy, and networking is increasing as well. The main focus of the workshop will be on the new and existing astronomical facilities whose goal is to observe a wide variety of astrophysical targets with no (or very little) human interaction. The workshop will become an international forum for researchers to summarise the most recent developments and ideas in the field.

24-29 May, 2009 | IVOA Interoperability Meeting | CDS Strasbourg, France
The IVOA Interop Meetings are aimed at making significant progress in defining standards and sharing best practices in the development of the world wide Virtual Observatory initiatives.

June 14 – July 5, 2009 | Wide-Fast-Deep Surveys: New Astrophysics Frontier | Aspen, Colorado
The goal of this workshop is to bring theorists, observers, and computational scientists together to discuss the discovery space of wide-fast-deep surveys, and to develop algorithms and observing strategies that maximize the scientific return of such programs.

3-5 August, 2009 | Earth and Space Science Informatics Workshop | UMBC, Baltimore, Maryland
Developing the Next Generation of Earth and Space Science Informatics: Technologies and the People That Will Implement Them

4 August, 2009 | IAU Working Group on Virtual Observatories (at IAU General Assembly) | Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

4-8 October, 2009 | ADASS XIX | Sapporo, Japan
The Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems (ADASS) conference is held each year at a different hosting astronomical institution. The 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.

9-13 November, 2009 | IVOA Interoperability Meeting | Garching bei Munchen, Germany
The IVOA Interop Meetings are aimed at making significant progress in defining standards and sharing best practices in the development of the world wide Virtual Observatory initiatives.

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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