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 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.

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 .