New releases of TOPCAT and STILTS have been released:

TOPCAT v3.6
STILTS v2.2

You can find downloads and additional information at the usual places:

http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/
http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/

Significant upgrades are:

Session and Multi-Table save/load (TOPCAT):
From the Save Window, as well as the old behaviour of saving the
current table to a file, you now have two new options:
Save multiple tables to a single container file, or save the
TOPCAT session to a single container file.  These are similar,
but in the latter case subsets, hidden columns, sort orders etc
are saved as well as the table data itself.  When a file saved
in this way is loaded, all the tables will be loaded in.

Multi-table copy (STILTS):
There are new STILTS commands tmulti and tmultin which can copy
multiple input files to a single container output file
(typically multi-extension FITS or multi-TABLE VOTable).

System Browser (TOPCAT):
The TOPCAT load and save windows now have a new button “System Browser”
which can be used as an alternative to the old Filestore Browser
button.  It lets you use your platform’s native OS file browser,
which may give Mac and Windows users a more familiar and convenient
experience.

Rename/Delete Row Subsets (TOPCAT):
At long last, the Subset Window provides options for deleting and
renaming subsets.  Apologies to those who’ve been asking that this
has taken so long to implement.

JSAMP upgrade:
The JSAMP library used is now v1.1; amongst other things it means
that if you’re using Java 1.6 on a suitable desktop, a SAMP Hub
started from TOPCAT will show up as an icon in the “System Tray”.

There are a number of other minor enhancements and bugfixes as well.
For details see the respective version histories:

http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/sun253/versions.html
http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/sun256/versions.html

Finally, from this version, TOPCAT and STILTS require version 1.5 of the
Java Runtime Environment to run.

The May 2010 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 at ivoa.net.

VO services at JHU will be offline from 6pm EDT on Tuesday, April 27, 2010 until some time the following morning.  Open SkyQuery will not be available during this time, nor will applications such as WESIX that utilize the JHU-hosted Skynodes function during this time.

California Institute of Technology
Cahill Center for Astronomy & Astrophysics
Pasadena, CA, USA

The California Institute of Technology is hosting this international conference on the emerging field of AstroInformatics. AstroInformatics is envisioned as a broader intellectual, organizational, and funding environment, within which Virtual Observatories serve as particular institutions and provide fundamental functionalities and infrastructure.  Our goal is to both empower and engage the astronomy and applied computer science communities in developing and deploying new tools and methods, enabled by the computation and information technologies.

The conference will bring together a broad range of experts in these and related fields, and address a wide range of topics, including knowledge extraction from massive and complex data sets, trends in computing technologies, visualization, novel scholarly communication, collaboration, and education tools and environments, new and emerging modalities for scientific publishing, community development and sociological changes prompted by the evolving scientific methodology and technology,inter-disciplinary connections, etc.  The last day of the conference will be devoted to the Practical AstroSemantics workshop.

The conference will consist of a small number of invited review talks, and panel-led discussions.  Contributed papers are accepted as posters.

For more information or to register, visit http://www.astro.caltech.edu/ai10

A new version of DataScope (version 3.2) has been released. Using the full Directory for data collections and catalogs, the DataScope tool queries hundreds of astronomical services about a given location or region and organizes the data so that you can browse it, select data for download, or pass it into compatible tools for further analysis.

This new version contains significant enhancements to how data tables are displayed. Using the VOView web application (under development by the international VO community), tables can now be interactively manipulated. VOView is a utility for viewing large data tables within a Web browser. It is optimized for handling tables ranging in size from 1000 to 100,000 rows. A widget is provided whereby a user can select which columns to display and what order to display them in. Row paging of the tables is also provided.

Try it now!

Collect all data at a given position. DataScope

Download the new Transient Events Application at the iTunes Store! The heavens are much more dynamic than most people realize. Every night stars and galaxies vary in brightness and comets move through our solar system. The astronomy community has survey telescopes monitoring the sky on a regular basis looking for objects which vary in brightness or position in the night sky. The images from these telescopes are analyzed automatically and variable objects are published through the Skyalert system. Skyalert uses the international XML standard VOEvent for transmitting information about a recent astronomical transient, with a view to rapid follow-up. A VOEvent packet contains one or more of the “who, what, where, when, how, why” of a detected event.

Transient Events currently receives events from the Catalina Real-Time Survey (CRTS), with more surveys to be added in the future.  (Read more about the features of the Transient Events iPhone App)

The real-time event discovery, processing, and dissemination of events is made possible by NASA under grant NNG05GF22G, and by the NSF under grants AST-0909182 (CRTS) and OCI-0915473 (Skyalert). Creation of the Transient Events application was funded by the the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST).

The following new releases were made on 25 March 2010:

TOPCAT v3.5-2

STILTS v2.1-2

Updates/improvements include:

• JyStilts: You can now invoke STILTS commands from Jython as an alternative to the Unix/DOS command line.  This seems to work well, but is somewhat experimental - feedback is encouraged.  See http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/sun256/jystilts.html
• Crossmatching enhancements: Scalability and performance have been improved for the STILTS and TOPCAT crossmatching functions.  Quantitative differences depend on detailed requirements, but maximum table size increases of a factor of 5 and CPU time decreases of a factor of 3 are typical; ten million is now a ballpark figure for the number of rows you can match in a reasonable amount of memory. If you have crossmatching requirements which are still out of the scope of this software, please make contact through the TOPCAT web page

These releases also contain quite a number of smaller performance and functionality enhancements and bug fixes.  For details, see the full version histories: TOPCAT and STILTS.

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)