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

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.

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 IVOA VOEvent Working Group announces a workshop, the fourth of the series, to be held at the UCO/Lick Observatory at UC Santa Cruz, April 26-30, 2009

The astronomical time domain ranges from solar physics and solar system objects to objects and processes at galactic and cosmological distances. Transients arrive via electromagnetic radiation, gravitational waves, neutrinos and other particles. Discoveries are made via spacecraft and by ground-based surveys, through automatic pipelines and the Virtual Observatory, with robotic telescopes and by the human eye. A strong interdisciplinary agenda will engage the emerging information infrastructure for astronomical transient events and their rapid follow-up.

Session themes will include:

• Connecting a robotic telescope to an event stream
• Real-time mining of event streams
• Event streams: Catalina, OGLE, MOA
• BoF for event providers: LOFAR, Skymapper, GCN etc
• Event authoring and real-time dissemination

More information at the Hotwired2 Website. Registration Is Now Open!

Second International Workshop on Practical Semantic Astronomy
2-5 March 2009
Glasgow, UK.

Semantic astronomy promises to expand the scientific discovery potential of exponentially growing data collections by enabling natural language querying, content-based searching, rich metadata markup and retrieval, rapid integration of diverse data collections, and machine-assisted scientific discovery.

Practical Semantic Astronomy 2009 is the second in a series of workshops first held at Caltech in February 2008.  The workshop brings together experts from a broad range of disciplines using semantic technologies, alongside practitioners experimenting with these techniques to address current problems in astroinformatics. Read the rest of this entry

4th NVO Summer School - Sponsored by the US National Virtual Observatory Project
to be held September 3-11, 2008
The Lodge at Santa Fe, Santa Fe, New Mexico

WEBSITE NOW OPEN FOR APPLICATIONS:   www.us-vo.org/summer-school/2008

In this nine-day, hands-on program, participants will work with experienced NVO users and software specialists to become familiar with how to discover, access, visualize, and analyze data with the Virtual Observatory. Those attending will be introduced to VO tools and utilities by using them to accomplish a variety of research goals. Some of the research tasks that will be addressed include data mining, multiwavelength analysis, and temporal astronomy. In the latter part of the summer school, small teams will pursue their own VO-enabled projects.

Important Dates
June 15: Deadline for applications
July 1: Applicants informed of acceptance
August 1: Registration fee due

Lecture Topics Include
Using the VO to Study Clusters of Galaxies
The Power of VOTables
Introduction to XML
A Universal View of Spectra
VOEvent: Rapid Reporting for Transients
Using IDL & IRAF with VO
Finding Services in the VO Registry
Google Mashups and WorldWide Telescope
Databases and SQL
Astronomy with Crossmatched Catalogs
VO for Mobile Devices
Web Services with Apache and CherryPy
Join the VO: Publishing and Serving Data

How to Apply

An application form is available on the website. Anyone interested in learning how to use the VO for astronomical research is welcome to apply, and we encourage participation from astronomers at any stage of their career.  Some course materials assume basic knowledge of Python or Java programming. Applications will be reviewed and students will be informed of their acceptance by July 1.  Participation is limited to 40 students.

Fees & Financial Assistance

A $500 registration fee will be required from all participants. However, a fee waiver may be requested in the event of financial hardship; these waivers will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. Upon acceptance to the program, fees must be paid by August 1. Accomodations are provided for all participants.  In addition, a travel stipend of up to $400 and per-diem stipend of $225 are available for successful applicants from US institutions who can commit to attending the entire course and who do not have funds available to cover these expenses.

Faculty and Organizing Committee

Roy Williams, Caltech; Michael Fitzpatrick, NOAO; Dave De Young, NOAO; Matthew Graham, Caltech; Gretchen Greene, STScI; Robert Hanisch, STScI; Simon Krughoff, University of Washington; Thomas McGlynn, NASA GSFC; Chris Miller, NOAO; Ray Plante, NCSA/University of Illinois; Doug Tody, NRAO.

QUESTIONS? Email summer-school@us-vo.org

The NVO Summer School is made possible through the support of the National Science Foundation.

VOEvent is the emerging International Virtual Observatory standard for distributing timely notifications of transient celestial events. The VOEvent specification provides a method for alerting subscribers to celestial phenomena in need of rapid, often automatic, observational follow-up. The IVOA VOEvent working group is responsible for continuing to develop the specification and for motivating the development of conforming systems, interoperable with each other and with prior community resources.

A common vision for VOEvent was forged at the first VOEvent workshop at Caltech in April 2005. The fruits of that workshop included v1.0 of the VOEvent XML specification, as well as example packets and a schema for validating those packets. Initial transport prototypes have been designed and deployed, and as a result actual event streams from such phenomena as gamma ray bursts are being captured as conforming VOEvent packets.

NVO is cosponsoring the second VOEvent workshop to be held in Tucson on December 5-6, 2005. Please see the meeting website for details. We hope to continue rapid progress on resolving thorny technical issues such as the proper semantics for specifying astronomical space-time coordinates or for specifying the classification of astronomical objects and processes. In addition, renewed attention will be directed to understanding the science drivers common to all time domain astronomy. VOEvent does not exist in a vacuum, and seeks to both benefit from, and provide evolutionary benefit to, prior astronomical transient event alert systems.

The US National Virtual Observatory hosted its second Summer School on 6-15 September 2005, at the Aspen Meadows Resort in Aspen, Colorado. Thirty-nine participants worked with experienced NVO scientists and software developers to learn how to do astrophysics with the Virtual Observatory. Participants learned how to use the data discovery, data access, and high-performance computing capabilities of the Virtual Observatory along with VO analysis tools and utilities. A series of software tutorials provided hands-on experience in using VO tools and services. Participants then had the opportunity to work on self-motivated projects, building VO-enabled applications and doing VO-enabled research. The US NVO Project greatly appreciates the sponsorship of NSF and NASA for the Summer School, and thanks the participants for their attention and interest in the Virtual Observatory. The proceedings of the 2005 Summer School are available online at http://www.us-vo.org/summer-school/2005/proceedings/

The IVOA VOEvent workshop held at Caltech in Pasadena, California concluded April 14, 2005 with an agreement by an international team on an information infrastructure to support the burgeoning field of event-based astronomy.

As we measure the sky with ever-increasing depth and breadth, the Universe seems filled with violent, distant explosions, trans-Neptunian objects, and asteroids that come all too close to the Earth. The detection and understanding of these transient and immediate phenomena requires new kinds of surveys, fast data reduction, and and fast response by the astronomical community. Providers of the event stream include the Swift and Integral satellites for gamma-ray bursts, supernova “factories”, and synoptic surveys coming online now and planned for the future. There are robotic telescope projects that will respond in seconds to these discovery events, giving a comprehensive, panchromatic view. Until now, events have been distributed in various formats and protocols, so that aggregation and federation have been difficult. Users of such events have been forced to create specialized software to receive such streams. The objective of the VOEvent working group is to build an open standard for exchanging messages about these immediate astronomical events, including publication, archiving, query, subscription, and aggregation.

The VOEvent standard has been agreed in rough form at the workshop, and includes the following features:

• Buy-in for the new standard from projects that include: GCN, LSST, Pan-STARRS, Palomar-Quest, LIGO, eStars, Raptor, Pairitel, ATEL, and Hands-On Universe.
• The possibility of simplicity (the mantra “Publisher, RA, Dec, Magnitude”), and also the possibility of positional and semantic accuracy,
• Division into sections: Who, Wherewhen, What, How, Hypothesis, and Citations.
• Contact and publisher information so that consumers of events can restrict event subscription to trusted sources,
• Rich semantic content through the IVOA UCD vocabulary [2] to express the meaning of project-specific data in an interoperable way,
• Integration with the IVOA Space-Time Coordinate schema[3], so that locations and timing can be defined either very simply or with sophistication and precision,
• Integration with the Remote Telescope Markup Language (RTML) so that VOEvents can be rapidly converted to scheduling instructions for a telescope,
• A vocabulary of event types that can be used to express a hypothesis about the astronomical meaning of the event, a way to express association with, and positional offset from a given object,
• A global identifier structure for events so they can be cited into the future,
• Message types such as Discovery, Followup, Retraction, and Supercede to provide a coherent picture of distributed knowledge about a discovery,
• Modular XML syntax, allowing the use of pre-built tools for parsing, storage, and filtering, as well as a clear path to extensibility.

Results of the meeting included a number of action items, such as initial implementations and documentation, and produced two “sample” event documents. The report of the workshop, including presentations and the sample VOEvents can be found on the VOEvent Workshop website.

In conjunction with the January 2005 meeting of the American Astronomical Society, the NVO released a first set of software tools and applications that make it easy to locate, retrieve, and analyze data from archives and catalogs worldwide:

• The NVO Registry Portal at STScI finds source catalogs, observation logs, image archives, and other astronomical resources registered with the NVO.
• NVO DataScope helps you discover and explore astronomical data from repositories around the world.
• OpenSkyQuery lets you cross-match your data with numerous catalogs.
• NVO Spectrum Services allow you to search, plot, and retrieve Sloan, 2dF, and other spectra.
• The Web-Enabled Source Identification with Cross-Matching (WESIX) package lets you upload images to SExtractor and cross-correlate the objects found with selected survey catalogs.
• How to publish your data collections to the NVO provides software libraries and sample code of VO Services for people who want to write their own VO-enabled applications.

These tools are based upon international standards developed in collaboration with the International Virtual Observatory Alliance. All are available at http://us-vo.org/apps/.

A special session titled Astronomical Research with the Virtual Observatory was also held at the AAS meeting. This session focused on VO-enabled research and featured invited presentations from astronomers who are providing or utilizing VO tools and technology in their professional work.

The picture shows Jim Ulvestad (NRAO) and Rodger Doxsey (STSci) enjoying the NVO “blimp” at the exhibit.