VO Short Courses

The Virtual Observatory (VO) gives astronomers access to a wide range of astronomical data and services hosted all over the world. At AG Tagung 2011 in Heidelberg, Germany's VO organization GAVO will hold three short courses introducing various tools and techniques to unlock this rich data source. Each course focuses on a different tool. They can be attended independently of each other.

GAVO invites students and researchers alike to participate in these events. In order to let us estimate demand, we would appreciate registriation by E-mail to gavo@ari.uni-heidelberg.de, but spontaneous participants are welcome as well. Participants should bring their own computers if at all possible.

Also note there is a splinter meeting on the VO on Tuesday.

Aladin

Aladin is the VO's premier tool to locate and analyze images. Whether you are trying to check an object's history or need to combine data from across the electromagnetic spectrum, whether you want to calibrate an image on your local disk or identify objects by querying the VO's data holdings, Aladin is there to help.

In the short course, Mark Allen and Thomas Boch from CDS (Strasbourg) will introduce you to the features of Aladin and show the basic techniques of working with images in the VO.

Downloads for the course: Aladin.

Slides, Tutorial.

September 21, 2011, 14:00-18:00, Neue Universität, Hörsaal 4a: A short course on Aladin.

TOPCAT

Working with tables is the everyday activity of many resarchers. TOPCAT does what you want with tables, and it does so closely integrated into the VO. From sorting to crossmatches, from histograms to density plots, TOPCAT is the swiss army knife of data manipulation and visualization. TOPCAT also has a sibling called STILTS that lets you script TOPCAT's power.

TOPCAT's author Mark Taylor will show you how you can do more with your tables and the VO using TOPCAT.

Downloads for the course: TOPCAT, STILTS, Aladin.

September 22, 2011, 14:00-18:00, Neue Universität, Hörsaal 4a: A short course on TOPCAT.

TAP and ADQL

Downloading data in text files and trying to make sense of them in FORTRAN programs never worked really well and completely fails for data-intensive research making use of dozens of potentially huge resources.

SDSS or the Millennium simulation have lead the way to instead employ modern query languages to investigate structured data on remote servers. In the VO, you can now send queries and data to servers in a standard protocol, TAP, in a standard language, ADQL.

In this short course, GAVO's Markus Demleitner will give a quick introduction into the query language and introduce two tools that speak TAP: TOPCAT as a graphical client, and tapsh, modelled after common database shells.

Downloads for the course: TOPCAT, tapsh.

September 23, 2011, 14:00-18:00, Neue Universität, Hörsaal 4a: A short course on TAP and ADQL.

gavo@ari.uni-heidelberg.de

Last change: 2011-08-03