US Virtual Astronomical Observatory

IVOA Newsletter 010 – May 2013

admin — Mon, 06 May 2013 16:17:12 +0000

The May 2013 issue of the IVOA Newsletter is now available at http://ivoa.net/newsletter/010/. This biannual newsletter for astronomers is intended to highlight new capabilities of VO tools and technologies for doing astronomy research. It also lists recent papers and upcoming events. Featured in this issue: Visualizing astronomical data with VOPlot v1.8 SED analysis with Iris [...]

Ars Technica: Astronomers and medical researchers deal with a common challenge

admin — Wed, 01 May 2013 21:44:17 +0000

What’s the connection between studying distant galaxies or planets and curing diseases? Astronomers and medical researchers share a common problem of extracting useful information from massive data sets and are, at times finding common solutions. Read more about the overlaps between these two apparently disparate fields and the role of the VO in these projects [...]

VAO Software Release: Scalable Cross Comparison Service (version 1.2)

admin — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 15:51:31 +0000

The VAO has released a new version of the Scalable Cross Comparison (SCC) Service v1.2 on 27 April, 2013. The SCC is a web-based application that performs spatial cross-comparisons between user source tables and on-line catalogs. This release replaces the old Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 7 (SDSS DR7) catalog with the current SDSS DR9. Try it [...]

Updates to TOPCAT and STILTS tools

admin — Mon, 01 Apr 2013 16:20:06 +0000

Version 4.0b of TOPCAT and version 2.5 of STILTS are now available. New features for TOPCAT are described here and the web pages and version histories for both tools can be found at the links below: STILTS: http://www.star.bristol.ac.uk/~mbt/stilts/ TOPCAT: http://www.star.bristol.ac.uk/~mbt/topcat/

The Virtual Observer – March 2013

admin — Thu, 21 Mar 2013 22:57:39 +0000

A summary of Virtual Observatory news for the US astronomical research community. Supported and compiled by the VAO. In this issue: VAO @ AAS 221st meeting VO Community Days Selected VO-related Publications Recent Software Releases Read the newsletter here!

European Astronomical Data Center Forum 2013

admin — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 15:58:43 +0000

The CoSADIE project is organizing a European Data Centre Forum at the Zentrum fuer Astronomie der Universitaet Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany, on June 10 and 11, 2013. The goal of this two day Astronomy Data Center Forum is to bringtogether VO engineers and data providers to foster an interchange ofideas, and to discuss plans and requirements [...]

VOStat: A Statistical Web Service for Astronomers

admin — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 09:20:13 +0000

VOStat is a simple statistical web service that lets you analyze your data without the hassle of downloading or installing any software. VOStat provides interactive statistical analysis of astronomical tabular datasets. It is integrated into the suite of analysis and visualization tools associated with the Virtual Observatory (VO) through the SAMP communication system. A user [...]

VOPlot and Astrostat Releases from VO-India

admin — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 18:35:27 +0000

The VO-India team announces the release of VOPlot (v1.8). VOPlot is a tool for visualizing astronomical data. A full list of release features is available in the change log. The team has also released AstroStat (v1.0 Beta). AstroStat allows astronomers to use both simple and sophisticated statistical routines on large datasets. VO-India welcomes your suggestions and comments [...]

.Astronomy 5

admin — Wed, 23 Jan 2013 16:28:38 +0000

Registration is now open for .Astronomy 5. The event will be hosted by Harvard’s Seamless Astronomy group at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development Center in Cambridge, MA, USA, September 16-18, 2013. .Astronomy is a three-day conference, unconference and hack day: all about astronomy online. .Astronomy aims to bring together an international community of astronomy [...]

VAO Software Release: Iris SED Analysis Tool (v1.2)

admin — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 14:00:09 +0000

The VAO has released a new version of the Iris SED Analysis Tool (v1.2) on 02 January, 2013. Iris is a downloadable application for analysis of 1-D astronomical Spectral Energy Distributions (SEDs). New features of Iris include: Visualization upgrades, including metadata filtering by boolean expression, individual point metadata display, and data point coloring Addition of [...]