Virtual Observatory links

• Urania AVO (currently in a category of its own)
  • Urania AVO original site (www.astro.ku.dk/avo)
  • My old development/test site
• Organizations, international/multinational
  • IVOA (International Virtual Observatory Alliance)
  • Euro-VO
    • DCA (Data Center Alliance)
    • VOTECH (Technology Centre)
    • Facility Centre (user support)
    • FP7 Euro-VO AIDA (Astronomical Infrastructure for Data Access)
• Organizations, national (not complete list)
  • (ca) Canadian Virtual Observatory (CVO)
  • (de) German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory (GAVO)
  • (es) Spanish Virtual Observatory (SVO)
  • (in) Virtual Observatory India
  • (uk) AstroGrid
  • (us) US National Virtual Observatory (NVO)
  See also the list of IVOA member organizations
• Other groups working on VO (not complete list)
  • ESO Virtual Observatory Systems Department
• Books, open access
  • ASP-CS 382 (2007): The National Virtual Observatory: Tools and Techniques for Astronomical Research (eds. Graham, Fitzpatrick, McGlynn) (or this link)
• Newsletters, etc.
  • IVOA newsletter
  • US NVO newsletter
• Meetings (selected list)
  • Astronomical Spectroscopy & The Virtual Observatory, ESAC/Madrid, March 2007
  • EURO-VO DCA workshops on Theory in the VO and Grid in the VO, MPE/Garching, April 2008;
    presentations are available from the Agenda page;
    proceedings papers:
    • Santander-Vela: The Virtual Observatory and Grid in Spain
  • EURO-VO DCA workshop on how to publish data in the VO, ESO/Garching, June 2008;
    presentations are available from the Program page, selected presentations (PDF):
    
    • Paolo Padovani (ESO) - Introduction to the VO
    • Jonathan Tedds (Astrogrid), Mark Allen (CDS), Evanthia Hatziminaoglou (ESO) - The VO in action
    • Anita Richards (AstroGrid) - IVOA standards
    • Sébastien Derriere (CDS) - Metadata in the VO (UCDs, units, UTypes)
    • Kevin Benson (AstroGrid) - Registry
  • US NVO summer school, Santa Fe, September 2008
  • IVOA Interoperability Meeting, Baltimore, October 2008
• More presentations, etc.
  • IVOA list of Training Materials and Presentations
  • Euro-VO Presentations
• Papers (selected)
  Refereed journals:
  • Szalay & Gray (2001): The World-Wide Telescope (Science)
  • Padovani et al. (2004): Discovery of optically faint obscured quasars with Virtual Observatory tools (A&A)
  • Richards et al. (2007): Using VO tools to investigate distant radio starbursts hosting obscured AGN in the HDF(N) region (A&A)
  • Graham (2008): Resource discovery with the VO registry (AN)
  Other:
  • Padovani (2006): The AVO to EURO-VO Transition (ASP-CS)
  • Valentijn et al. (2007): Astro-WISE: Chaining to the Universe (ASP-CS)
  • Andernach (2009): Safeguarding Old and New Journal Tables for the VO: Status for Extragalactic and Radio Data (Data Science Journal, in press)
  • Vignali et al.: Multi-wavelength data handling in current and future surveys: the possible role of Virtual Observatory (to be published in the Proceedings of the Workshop "Multiwavelength Astronomy and Virtual Observatory", held at ESAC-Madrid, December 1-3, 2008)
• Software
  • The AstroGrid Desktop Suite (see also install)
  • Aladin Sky Atlas
  • Saada (see also this DCA workshop page)
  • VisIVO (Visualisation Interface to the Virtual Observatory)
  • VOSpec
  • VOPlot
  • STIL (Starlink Tables Infrastructure Library)
  • STILTS (STIL Tool Set)
  • TOPCAT (Tool for OPerations on Catalogues And Tables)
  • More aimed at the general public:
    • Google Sky (part of Google Earth); also web interface at google.com/sky
    • worldwidetelescope.org (software for Microsoft Windows only; website requires Flash)
  • Lists of software/applications:
    • EURO-VO applications page
    • IVOA applications page
• Online tools
  • WESIX (Web Enabled Source Identification with X-matching)
  • NVO Spectrum Services
  • NVO Footprint Services
• Spectroscopy
  • VOSpec Tool main page (requires java plugin)
• Standards, protocols, recommendations, etc.
  • Simple Application Messaging Protocol (SAMP): messaging protocol that enables astronomy software tools to interoperate and communicate. SAMP will superseed PLASTIC (PLatform for AStronomical Tool InterConnection)
  • Simple Cone Search: protocol for retrieving records from a catalog of astronomical sources
  • Simple Image Access: protocol for retrieving image data from a variety of astronomical image repositories
  • Simple Spectral Access: protocol to remotely discover and access one dimensional spectra
  • SkyNode Interface: protocol to allow a client to make an ADQL query of the SkyNode database
  • Astronomical Data Query Language (ADQL): an SQL-like language for searching astronomical tables etc.
  • Unified Content Descriptors (UCDs): IVOA-controlled vocabulary for describing astronomical data quantities (see also this CDS/Vizier page)
  • VOEvent: standard for representing transient celestial events; see also voeventnet.org
  • VOResource: XML encoding schema for resource metadata
  • VOSpace: IVOA interface to distributed storage
  • VOTable: standard for tables containing data and metadata (see also Mark Taylor: VOTable: Why, What and How?)
  See also IVOA Documents and Standards
• Registries
  • IVOA Registry of Registries
• VO-related
  • Astro-WISE (Astronomical Wide-field Imaging System for Europe)
  • TERAPIX (Traitement Élémentaire, Réduction et Analyse des PIXels de megacam)
• Illustrations of VO use
  • Euro-VO Scientific Workflows
• Misc.
  • AVO prototype download (for AVO demo 2005?), see also this 2004 NEON archive school tutorial (both links found on Paolo Padovani's VO page)
• Useful words not covered above
  • Data model: ...
  • Interoperability: the ability to interoperate
  • Mashup: web application that combines data from more than one source into a single integrated tool (definition taken from Wikipedia)
  • Metadata: data about data, description of data
  • Provenance: origin, history (see also Wikipedia)
  • Use case: ...
  • utypes: pointers to specific data models (definition taken from Sébastien Derriere (CDS) - Metadata in the VO (UCDs, units, UTypes))
  • Web service: interface used for application to application communication on the WWW (see Wikipedia and the voservices.org help page)
  • Workflow: a sequence of VO-related tasks, possibly including loops, which can be saved in some format and then re-run (definition taken from the AstroGrid scripting page) (see also Wikipedia)
  • XML schema: higher-level description of the structure and content of an XML document(?) (see also Wikipedia)
• Mostly of historical interest
  • On-line complement of the 1995 book Information & On-line Data in Astronomy

Other astronomy links

• Literature
  • ADS abstract service
  • ArXiv, astro-ph, new submissions (DE mirror)
    • arxivsorter
  • Journals
    • A&A
    • AJ
    • ApJ
    • MNRAS
    • PASP
• Organizations
  • IAU
  • ESO
• Data centres, etc.
  • CDS
    • Simbad
  • NED
• Observing planning tools
  • ESO sky calendar tool
  • ESO Paranal meteo monitor
• GRB
  • GCN
  • Jochen Greiner's GRB list
  • Pall Jakobsson: The Redshift Distribution of Swift GRBs
  • Swift GRB Table and Lookup
• Projects
  • EDisCS (ESO Distant Clusters Survey)
  • GAMA (Galaxy And Mass Assembly)
  • MACS (MAssive Cluster Survey)
  • SDSS (Sloan Digital Sky Survey)
  • VISTA
• Discussion fora
  • cosmocoffee
• Lists of astronomy resources on the web
  • AstroWeb: Astronomy resources on the Internet (page at CDS)
• Encyclopediae
  • COSMOS - The SAO Encyclopedia of Astronomy
• Online tools
  • Ned Wright's Javascript Cosmology Calculator
• Software
  • Goddard IDL Astronomy User's Library
  • hyperz
• Spectroscopy
  • LRIS Night Sky Emission Line Plots
  • UVES sky emission spectrum
  • MILES: A Medium resolution INT Library of Empirical Spectra
  • ESO list of spectrophotometric standard stars
  • La Silla spectroscopic extinction curve
  • Princeton/MIT SDSS Spectroscopy Home Page
• Public outreach
  • Astronomy Picture of the Day
  • International Year of Astronomy 2009
• The public helping the astronomers
  • Galaxy Zoo
• Images of astronomical objects useful for teaching, presentations, etc.
  • SDSS Image of the Week Archive
  • SDSS images of selected RC3 galaxies
  • Hubblesite Gallery
  • European HST image page
  • ESO Images

Selected computing links

• Programming and scripting languages
  • IDL
  • Java; tutorials
  • Python
    • Python for Scientists (astronomically biased)
  • Perl
• Editors
  • Vim (vi improved)
• E-Mail clients
  • Mutt
• LINUX
  • LINUX distributions
    • CentOS (a Red Hat Enterprise Linux derivative)
    • Scientific Linux (a Red Hat Enterprise Linux derivative)
    • Debian
    • Ubuntu
    • Wikipedia pages: intro and comparison; DistroWatch
  • Misc.
    • linuxquestions.org
• Misc.
  • VirtualBox; for what it's about, see the reviews, e.g. this one from Desktoplinux, this one from Linuxgazette or this one from Softpedia

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Bo Milvang-Jensen 2008-2009. Page last updated: 25-May-2009