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 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.

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 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

VisIVO ON-LINE TUTORIAL
25 June 2009 - 3:00 pm (CET)

INAF-Astrophysical Observatory of Catania (Italy)
in collaboration with
Cineca  (Italy), University of Portsmouth (United Kingdom),
Cometa Consortium (Italy) and INFN (National Institute of Nuclear
Physics) Sezione di Catania (Italy)

VisIVO  is an integrated suite of tools and services specifically designed for the Virtual Observatory. This suite constitutes a software framework for effective visual discovery in currently available (and next-generation) very large-scale astrophysical datasets coming from real-world observations or numerical simulations. VisIVO consists of VisiVO Desktop - a standalone application for interactive visualization on standard PC platforms, VisIVO Server - a grid enabled platform for ultra high performance visualization and VisIVO Web - a custom designed web portal supporting services based on the VisIVO Server functionality.

This tutorial will provide hands-on training at introductory level using the core features of VisIVO Desktop, VisIVO Server and VisIVO Web for effective astronomical visualisation. There will be a single training session with planned duration of three hours.

The deadline for registering for this event is Saturday 20 June 2009. Participation in this tutorial is completely free, no fees are required. Accepted participants will receive all necessary information for connecting to the event’s www pages. The agenda and a web link for registration are available at http://visivo.oact.inaf.it, please follow the link entitled “Second VisIVO On Line Tutorial.”

The National Virtual Observatory is pleased to announce the establishment of an international data exchange standard called VOTable, an effort led by F. Ochsenbein of the Data Center in Strasbourg, France, and R. Williams of Caltech’s Center for Advanced Computing Research. Other co-authors are from the UK, Germany, and Canada.

In the past, astronomical data services would return human-readable content that a machine could not understand, so it was difficult to link distributed services into networks and grids. However, VOTable is in XML format, meaning that computers can easily read, filter, and output to other computers, allowing federation and joining of information resources.

In VOTable, physical quantities are structured with sophisticated semantic information, so that applications and data can be connected automatically and intelligently. VOTable is designed for Grid computing: it can represent very large datasets by using XML to describe the data stream, but parallel binary streams for the data itself.

Further information:

http://us-vo.org/VOTable
http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/doc/VOTable

Services that create VOTable

http://virtualsky.org/conesearch.htm
http://vizier.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/votable?-c=Crab