The November 2009 issue of the IVOA Newsletter is now available at
http://ivoa.net/newsletter/. 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. Comments and feedback are encouraged; you may contact the editors at ivoa-news-editors@ivoa.net.

This is the final call for registration for the .Astronomy 2009 meeting to be held in the Lorentz Center in Leiden from 30 Nov 2009 through 4 Dec 2009. The .Astronomy conference series explores the connection between astronomy and the Internet. More information about the meeting is available on the conference website http://dotastronomy.com/.

Astronomy is facing a paradigm shift. The huge quantities of data that will be generated by a new generation of surveys and instruments require new ways of thinking. At the same time, an ever more connected world is bringing astronomy to the masses by the vast possibilities of the web, via  blogs,podcasts, social networks and more.

Google Sky and Microsoft’s Worldwide Telescope have taken astronomy into the home with stunning elegance. Exciting citizen science projects enlist the general public into world-class astronomy research. Data mining, robotic telescopes and virtual observatories will soon takepetabytes of data to a global audience of professionals and amateurs. Communication and networking technologies are changing science, for both researchers and the public alike.

In 2008, the first .Astronomy conference took place in Cardiff, to discuss the ideas and methods emerging in this new era and the way in which they present interesting and novel opportunities for both conducting and communicating astronomy.

Themes and topics

• Citizen Science
  Galaxy Zoo
  Web-based platforms for citizen science projects
  Future citizen science projects
  New media for outreach and communication
  IYA 2009 and the web
• Podcasting and blogging astronomy
• Microblogging
  Networked technologies for research
• Virtual observatory
• Literature tools
• Data mining
  Visualisation concepts
• Google Sky, Microsoft Worldwide Telescope
• Visualisation as a research aid

An entire day of the workshop will be devoted to an “Astronomy Hack Day”, where developers can
work together on novel astronomy-related applications. We will be working with both web based
software, software for mobile platforms such as the Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android phones, as
well open hardware projects based on the Arduino microprocessor board. We aim to lay the basis for
several new citizen science projects during the .Astronomy week.

Workshop format

We plan to have talks in the morning of every day, with the afternoon reserved for working break-out groups or discussion sessions.  This means the number of “formal talks” will be quite limited, but everyone will have a chance to speak their mind. Each day will deal with one of the above themes, with the 5th day devoted to the Hack Day.

Scientific organizing committee

Dr. Alasdair Allan, University of Exeter (@aallan)
Dr. Sarah Kendrew, University of Leiden (@sarahkendrew)
Dr. Chris Lintott, University of Oxford (@chrislintott)
Dr. Stuart Lowe, University of Manchester (@astronomyblog)
Dr. Carolina Ödman, University of Leiden/Universe Awareness (@carolune)
Mr. Robert Simpson, University of Cardiff (@orbitingfrog)

.Astronomy and the International Year of Astronomy

The United Nations proclaimed 2009 the International Year of Astronomy (IYA2009) in celebration of the anniversary of Galileo Galilei’s first astronomical observations through a telescope. The vision of the IYA is to “help the citizens of the world rediscover their place in the Universe through the day- and night-time sky, and thereby engage a personal sense of wonder and discovery”. The internet has been instrumental in bringing the activities of the IYA to a huge public with blogs, podcasts andwebcasts. During the .Astronomy workshop we will review the success of these initiatives and discuss how to keep the momentum of the IYA into the coming years.

This workshop is an official IYA2009 conference.

What's new in Aladin v6: click to enlarge

The Centre de Données Astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS) ispleased to announce Aladin release 6:

http://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/

Aladin is an interactive software sky atlas allowing the user to visualize digitized astronomical images, superimpose entries from astronomical catalogues or databases, and interactively access related data and information from the Simbad database, the VizieR service and other archives for all known sources in the field. The new release integrates the following new developments:

• Undergraduate mode: Aladin simplified interface for undergraduate purposes
• SAMP compatibility: Support for the new PLASTIC standard called SAMP allowing interoperability between several VO applications
• Calibrated JPEG: AVM and FITS keywords support in JPEG images for reading and writting astrometrical calibrated colored images
• Dynamical histogram: Interactive histogram for browsing current measurements
• Photometry tools: tools for simple photometry measurements (by circles or polygons)
• Simbad fast access: fast Simbad access allowing very large queries
• VizieR whole catalog: new checkbox in the VizieR forms for downloading whole catalogs
• Full screen: Full screen support and preview window support
• RGB, Blink and pixel computations: supported for non-calibrated images
• Undo position list:for going back to the previous locations
• FITS Rice: Support for FITS RICE compression
• “get” script: get script improvements allowing not positional parameters and SIA/SSA filtering
• FoV rotation: FOV rotation center control
• Translation: Italian (G.Iafrate), German (F.Freistetter), Persian (A.Sedaghatkish)

Dear all.

The PANDORA (“Programs for AstroNomical Data Organization Reduction and Analysis”) group at the Istituto di Astrofisica Spaziale e Fisica Cosmica in Milano, Italy, is pleased to announce the release of SAMPy 1.11.1 available at the PANDORA group site. SAMPy is a Python implementation of the Simple Application Messaging Protocol.

This new release includes the following changes:

• Public ID format still simplified
• New Hub metadata added
• XML-RPC faultCode value set to be int (Douglas Burke patch)
• samp.app.ping and client.env.get MTypes supported by default
• SAMPHubProxy.declareSubscriptions “mtypes” parameter renamed as
• “subscriptions”
• bindReceiveNotification and bindReceiveCall methods of SAMPClient and
• SAMPIntegratedClient classes have been changed adding an optional
• metadata” parameter
• declareSubscriptions method of SAMPClient and SAMPIntegratedClient
• changed adding an optional “subscriptions” parameter
• Interrupted system calls error caught
• Other small bugs fixed
• README updated

If you have any comment, bug notification, help request, etc. please contact the team by using the PANDORA site contact page.

The ESA-VO Team is pleased to announce the release of VOSpec 5.5 available at:

• Applet version
• Webstart version

VOSpec is a tool able to handle Spectra in the VO context as well as providing analysis capabilities and easy integration of spectra coming from different data providers, wavelengths, and different metadata (e.g. units). This new release includes the following mayor features and improvements from V5.1:

• SAMP Integration - http://esavo.esac.esa.int/VOSpecManual/interoperability.html
• Best Fit Algorithm -   http://esavo.esac.esa.int/VOSpecManual/fitting.html
• Support to 1-D fits spectrum image - http://esavo.esac.esa.int/VOSpecManual/gui.html#open
• Update of the local file parsers, with use of the NVO SED library kindly provided and supported by the NVO Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophisics -http://vo.cfa.harvard.edu/soft/)

Furthermore, improvements from version 4 include:

• Registry interface update to rec 1.01 - New Euro-VO and NVO registries usage
• SSA interface updated to REC 1.04
• NVO SED library inclusion for SDM 1.0+ compatible spectra
• Dual spectra selector
  Reconfigurable tree
  Sortable table
• Local Registry
• Distance metadata calculation

For further information (manual, versioning info, other access interfaces) please check the VOSpec webpage.

High Performance Computing in Observational Astronomy: Requirements and Challenges
12-16 October 2009
Pune, India.

Poster: PDF

The theme of this meeting will be to discuss computationally intensive techniques important for different branches of astronomy.  These techniques are increasingly being applied and planned for data collection, real-time and off-line analysis, and interpretation of results.  Examples of such techniques include, among many others, software correlation of interferometric signals, dynamic beam forming and interference rejection, adaptive optics control for multi-segment telescopes, coded mask image analysis, matched filtering of gravitational wave signal, deconvolution and foreground subtraction of CMB maps, automated transient search etc.

Given the development and plans for large international astronomical facilities like the upgraded GMRT, eVLA, LOFAR, ASKAP, MeerKAT (and eventually the SKA) in radio, various new giant multi-segment mirror telescope projects in optical, new observatories like ASTROSAT in UV/x-ray, we feel that such a meeting will be well timed and will provide an appropriate forum for exchange of ideas and plans for handling the massive computing tasks associated with such large projects.  In particular, we feel that participants from different wave band regimes will benefit by possible cross-fertilization of ideas.  We expect significant participation from academia as well as the IT industry, and prominent researchers from both domains will be invited speakers at this meeting.

The following new minor releases were made on 17 July 2009:

• TOPCAT v2.7-2
• STILTS v2.0-4
• STIL v3.4-2

These releases contain minor enhancements, updates and bug fixes. Detailed information about the changes can be found at:

• http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/sun253/versions.html
• http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/sun256/versions.html
• http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stil/sun252/history.html

The UK’s AstroGrid project within which TOPCAT, STILTS and STIL have been supported, developed and maintained for the last three years has been terminated, and applications to fund a follow-on project for UK Virtual Observatory work have been unsuccessful. Attempts will be made to seek some other arrangement under which support for this software can continue, but as things stand it is likely that the author will no longer be available to work on it from around November 2009.  The same applies to JSAMP. See http://www.star.bristol.ac.uk/~mbt/future.html for more details.

A group at the University of Chicago, Department of Sociology, is involved in a study of how networking, distributed databases, grid computing, etc., are affecting both software development and scientific research.  The US National Virtual Observatory is of particular interest to them.  They have developed a survey to help judge the impact of these new technologies, and I encourage you to take a few minutes to fill it out (they say it takes 20 minutes, but it is more like 5-10).  Some of the language of the survey is pretty technical, but overall it is not too bad.  They will share the results with the NVO project, and this could be helpful to our understanding of how to focus our energies in the future to make the VO more useful.

So, please have a look.  What follows is the invitation to participate from the survey leader at U. Chicago, and then there is a link to the survey itself.

Thank you,
Bob Hanisch
US-VO Project Manager Read the rest of this entry

The organizing committee is pleased to announce the opening of registration for the 19th annual conference on Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems (ADASS).  The conference will be held in Sapporo, Japan at the Renaissance Sapporo Hotel during 4-8 October 2009.

The 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.  The program includes invited talks, contributed papers, display sessions, tutorials, and computer demonstrations, as well as special interest (”Birds of a Feather” or BOF) meetings.  These activities aim to encourage communication between software specialists, scientists, and also to stimulate further development of astronomical software and systems.  Participate in this exciting conference by submitting an oral or poster abstract, a demonstration, or a BoF proposal.

Key topics for this year’s conference include but are not limited to:

• Time domain astronomy
• “Most dangerous” process, design & implementation errors
• The Virtual Observatory
• Reusable archive technologies
• Commonly available development environments & tools

As this is the first ADASS in Asia, proposals that deal with topics of special interest to Asia are encouraged.

Details on the submission process can be found on the Conference website at http://www.adass.org/.

Important Dates:

• Deadline for Financial Aid Applications: July 1, 2009
• Deadline for Oral and Poster Abstract Submission: July 15, 2009
• Deadline for Demo Submission: July 15, 2009
• End of Early (discounted) Registration: July 31, 2009
• Deadline for BoF Submission: August 31, 2009

The Conference website will be updated regularly during the next few months to include information about the program, the current list of attendees, and the submitted abstracts.

http://adass2009.jp/

The AstroGrid project is pleased to announce the latest release of the AstroGrid VODesktop, version 1.2.3.1. This is a suite of desktop applications to enable astronomers to explore and bookmark resources from around the world, find data, store and share files in VOSpace, query databases, plot and manipulate tables, cross-match catalogs, and build and run scripts to automate sequences of tasks. Tools from other IVOA projects inter-operate with AstroGrid software, so you can also view and analyze images and spectra located in the VO.

The latest version includes new features and improvements, including improved descriptive information (metadata) for searching and filtering resources, and a new Multi-Query capability for searching resources against a user-supplied list of positions, as well as for just one position at a time. There are also a number of bug fixes and internal technical improvements. AstroGrid Python remains at V1.04. The latest version of Topcat is V3.4-1, March 2009. Important changes are listed at http://www.astrogrid.org/wiki/ReleaseNotes .