The November 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.

The CDS team has released their Portal, a new tool allowing you to search for available data in all CDS services through a unique Web interface.

This first version is focused towards search by position in Simbad, Aladin and VizieR.

Each user is also provided with a personal storage space where query results from Simbad or VizieR can be saved for later reuse. Users can upload their list of positions as VOTables and use them to query Simbad or VizieR tables.

The CDS Portal main page is available at http://cdsportal.u-strasbg.fr/

CDS Portal documentation :  http://cdsportal.u-strasbg.fr/doc

For iPhone or iPod touch users, a mobile version is available at http://cdsportal.u-strasbg.fr/mobile

Part of this application has been developed in the frame of the Euro-VO VOTech and AIDA projects.
Feedback and suggestions are welcome.

The new SAMPy release (1.2.0) is available at the PANDORA group site:

http://cosmos.iasf-milano.inaf.it/pandora/

Updates include:

• Fully support to SAMP_HUB environment variable as specified in SAMP 1.2 protocol.
• Added the possibility of specify a custom lockfile explicitly when a new hub instance is created (-f or –lockfile from command line, lockfile parameter of SAMPHubServer class).
• SAMPClient and SAMPIntegratedClient updated adding a generic bindReceiveMessage method, which allows to bind a single function to calls and notifications.
• Added SAMPMsgReplierWrapper decorator class/function, useful to wrap bound functions that might return a response (calls or generic functions passed to bindReceiveMessage). This decorator accepts a client instance as argument and allows to return response parameters as a simple map (without the need of explicitly call the reply operation).
• eclient.py example script added showing the decorators use.
• http_file_server.py utility script added. It is able to serve a lockfile (or any other file) through an HTTP address.

********* IMPORTANT NOTE *********

We wish to draw your attention to the following message, also posted on the PANDORA home page:

After more than five years, due to lack of manpower and funds, we cannot support the Pandora programs and help-desk any more. As from October first 2010, the help-desk will be unavailable, and programs will not be updated any more, not even for bug fixing. The current version of SAMPy and all our programs will remain available for download for a few months, without any support or guarantee for installation and usage. If during these five years you have appreciated our work, and wish to support us for a last attempt to raise funds, you may go to this link and subscribe our petition.

http://cosmos.iasf-milano.inaf.it/pandora/petition.html

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.