Articles from Meetings

• Small Telescopes, Large Surveys

  2019-03-13 Markus Demleitner

  

  Plate technology at Bamberg observatory: a blink comparator with one plate mounted, and a survey camera that was once used at Boyden Station, an astronomer outpost in 60ies South Africa.

  I'm currently at the workshop “Large surveys with small telescopes: past, present, and future” (or Astroplate III for short) in Bamberg, where people are discussing using and re-using the rich heritage of historical observations (hence the “plate” part) as well growing that heritage in the age of large CCDs, fast computers and large disks.

  Using and re-using is of course what the Virtual Observatory is about, and we've been keeping fairly large plate collections in our data center for quite a while (among them the Archives of Landessternwarte Königstuhl or the Palomar-Leiden Trojan surveys, and there is the WFPDB TAP-accessibly). Therefore, people from GAVO Heidelberg have been to all past astroplate conferences.

  For this one, I brought a brand-new tutorial on plate scans in the VO, which, I hope, also works as a general introduction to image discovery in the VO using SIAP, Datalink, and Obscore. If you're doing image stuff now and then, please have a quick look at the thing – I am particularly grateful for hints on what to improve or perhaps particularly obvious use cases for the material discussed.

  Such VO proselytising aside, the conference is discussing the wide variety of creative, low-cost data collectors out there as well as computer-aided re-analysis extracting new knowledge from decades-old data. If I had to choose a single come-to-think-of-it moment, it would be Norbert Zacharias' observation that if you have a well-behaved object and you'd like to know where it was in 1900, it's now more accurate to extrapolate Gaia astrometry to the epoch of observation than to measure it on the plate itself. Which is saying a lot about the amazing feat of engineering that Gaia is.

  This is not, however, an argument for dumping the old data. Usually, it is exactly what is not so well-behaved (like those) that's interesting – both in terms of astrometry and in terms of photometry (for which there's a lot more unruly behaviour in the first place). To figure out how objects don't behave well, and, for objects disguising as well-behaved only on time scales of the (say) Gaia mission, which these are, the key is “old” data. The freshness of which we're discussing this week.

• GAVO at AG-Tagung 2017, Göttingen

  2017-09-19 Markus Demleitner

  

  For the 11th time, GAVO has a booth at a meeting of the venerable Astronomische Gesellschaft (AG). This year, we are in Göttingen, again offering advice to users and data providers at our booth (if you're looking for us: We're close to the entrance of Hörsaal 5).

  And again we have a Puzzler, a little problem easily solved if you know your VO tech – and if you don't we'll gladly help you at our booth. We are also giving hints there, one being released at each coffee break on Tuesday and Wednesday (there are little posters with them, too, if you miss one). Of course, if you're not in Göttingen, you're still welcome to try your hand. You won't get to win our great first prize then, the big Crab Nebula towel (it should be easy to spot on the image above).

  If, on the other hand, you are in Göttingen, be sure to drop by our splinter meeting. Yours truly, for instance, will speak about EPN-TAP (remember And the Solar System, too right here? That's what this is about).

  Update 2017-09-20, 17:00 We've just given out the last hint for the puzzler, and so we can publish them all over on the puzzler archive: Hints for the 2017 puzzler. If you're in Göttingen, you still have until tomorrow 16:00 to hand in a solution and perhaps win our nice and fuzzy Crab Nebula towel.

  Update 2017-09-21, 17:00 And the winner is... again not from Marburg, which is beginning to become a running gag, and they've been unlucky for the last three years in a row. Anyway, here's our proposed solution.

  

• GAVO at the Northern Spring Interop

  2017-05-29 Markus Demleitner

  

  15 Years of IVOA: The birthday cake our Shanghai hosts prepared for us.

  Every half year, VO enthusiasts from all over the world gather for an “Interoperability conference”, or Interop for short. The latest such event, the Shanghai Interop 2017, ended Friday a week ago. It has been a “long” one again after the short southern spring Interop in Trieste last year (featured in this blog).

  As usual, it was a week of many discussions and much consensus-building. In this post, I'd like to mention a few of the GAVO-related contributions; links typcially go to slides or lecture notes PDFs.

  On the Registry side of things, we're currently (among many other things) briding the gap between DOIs and the Registry in VOResource 1.1, and we invited registry providers to take up the new features, as well as proposing how to update RegTAP (which is used to actually query the Registry) to cope with the new metadata.

  Also in Registry, our efforts of almost a decade to properly support registering tables and similar data collections bore fruit (Britain's Mark Taylor reported on his experiences taking up our current proposal), and the fairly spectacular new Aladin V10 (presented by the CDS' Pierre Fernique, who showed off what I'm tempted to call a “visual registry interface”) urgently needs what we've developed over the years.

  We furthermore reported on new steps to finally let people search the registry using Space-Time constraints (spoiler: the tech is almost there, registry records need lots of work).

  Spatial searches in the registries are one thing enabled by storing and searching for MOCs in relational databases, as was reported by Markus Nullmeier over in an Applications session. The setting may already tell you that these MOCs (Multi Order Coverages, a healpix-based way of representing fairly arbitrary areas on the sky) have applications far beyond Registry.

  Also in Apps, Ole reported on progress in packaging VO applications for easy and reliable installation, in this case for Debian and derivatives. Finally for Apps, Margarida reported on getting lines and line lists into the spectral analysis package SPLAT: Implementation of SLAP and VAMDC interfaces in SPLAT-VO.

  In the wider area of data access protocols and underlying data models, we contributed to Marco's talk on the long-overdue facelifting for the VO's bedrock, Simple Cone Search (Keeping SCS up-to-date within DAL landscape) – the fact that there's an installed base of 15000 of such services may let you guess that we need to tread lightly here. On the bleeding-edge side of things, we presented our current ideas on how, eventually, several data models, data modelling as such and the annotation of data according to these data models might play together in publishing time domain data with DACHS (previously featured on this blog in a slightly less technical way).

  We also talked about education and outreach. Hendrik reported on our ADQL course and how it helps future astronomers learn dealing efficiently with even very large datasets. Hendrik's long-lasting dedication to these topics did not go unpunished at this interop: since the Exec meeting on the Interop Wednesday he is vice-chairing the education interest group of the IVOA. Back in the session I also mused a bit about what metadata changes are needed to make the VO tutorial collection VOTT more useful.

  It is a particular pleasure for me to mention that the IVOA has a new interest group: “Solar System”. Regular readers of the blog will have noticed that I have a particularly soft spot in my heart for that crowd, and so I gave a short overview over how DaCHS is used among them, too.

  And that's just the official programme. Much more fixing, designing, and discussion went on between sessions or in the evenings. The latter, of course, included some decidedly less technical aspects. Including, as pictured above, a nice birthday cake for the IVOA, as it is now 15 year since the first Interop meeting in January 2002.

• Asterics Tech Forum

  2017-03-31 Kristin Riebe

  The 3. Asterics DADI Tech Forum took place last week in Strasbourg - and many GAVO members made contributions as well. This time, there were 3 slots for hackathon sessions, which were also used for discussions. We'll mention two highlights of our contributions here.

  We took the opportunity to push our Provenance Data Model efforts and used the hackathon slots for provenance discussions.

  One topic was the links between the simulation data model and ProvenanceDM, and how to map from SimDM to ProvenanceDM classes. This mapping works quite well and will be included in the working draft for the data model. We also had an interesting talk by José Enrique Ruiz on his view on Provenance, workflows, and - very important - the "deployer" and "system" provenance for storing all the environment variables that may be needed to rerun the processing of some observational data. Michèle Sanguillon also presented for the first time her extension to the prov Python library (W3C) with extensions from our IVOA Provenance Data Model. We also had interested people from outside the usual provenance-interested people joining in, e.g. from the Astron project. More about our Provenance modelling efforts can be found at IVOA Provenance wiki page.

  A world premiere (of sorts) was the first discussion of RegTAP 1.1. RegTAP is a search interface to the VO Registry; it is what TOPCAT or other VO clients uses when you type in keywords to locate services. A fairly direct web-basd interface is our WIRR registry interface. RegTAP will need a bit of a makeover since VOResource, the underlying metadata scheme is currently receiving one, allowing, in particular, for including DOIs and ORCIDs (John Does of this world, rejoice: People can finally uniquely find your data and not that of all the other J. Does) in Registry records and figuring out licenses on data. Licensing may not matter when you use data in a paper but it does matter if you want to redistribute data, e.g. for planetarium programs with catalog data or pretty pictures, or when re-mixing data.

  But of course the GAVOistas happily joined the fray on the many other topics discussed, from a standard format for a time series to interoperable authentication, from datalink applications to figuring out if data coming into a program should be treated as a collection of spectra or rather an object catalog – the latter in the context of the upcoming version 10 of the VO's premier image tool Aladin, which we saw (probably another premiere) demoed. We can already promise you an exciting update!

• And the Solar System, too

  2017-03-30 Markus Demleitner

  Virtual Observatory technologies are increasingly being adopted outside of “core” astronomy in the vicinity of the optical band (to which they have had, I'll have to admit, a certain slant) . An excellent example for that trend is the Europlanet community. Their goal is to make solar system data accessible without fiddling, and they are employing a wide range of VO standards for that. At the heart of their efforts are TAP and the VO Registry.

  While the usual VO client software will of course work fine with their services, they are offering a nice web-based discovery tool executing queries against an increasing number of services. Such uniform quering over many services is possible is because all of them implement TAP and host EPNcore tables. The resulting interface, also known as EPN-TAP, allows for very flexible discovery and retrieval of solar system data products, much like ObsTAP does for astronomical observations outside of the solar system.

  Since quite a few EPN-TAP services are built using GAVO's DaCHS publication suite, I was invited to this week's VESPA implementation workshop 2017 in Graz to help the data providers set up their services.

  I can't deny that I'm somewhat excited when I see how our software is used to publish spectra of the ice blocks in Saturn's ring taken by the lonely Cassini spacecraft still orbiting the gas giant, or data transmitted by Rosetta, now (and for who knows how long) sitting on comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. There's even an upcoming archive of solar system alerts that may, according to its builders, include events like meteor showers on Mars. I can almost hear my code whisper “I've archived signals of C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate”.

  Even documentation can become otherworldly in this business: Already in February, DaCHS has learnt to procude GeoJSON, a format common in the GIS community and also adopted by Europlanet – planetology has lots of common ground with geoinformatics. And in the reference documentation on annotating tables to enable that, when I wrote “standards-compliant GeoJSON clients will interpret your coordinates as WGS84 on Earth if you leave [frame annotation] out”, I was severely tempted to add “which is probably not what you want” and feel like Spaceman Spiff.

  Romantic space adventures aside, after this intense week, not only are there several additional or improved EPN-TAP services from places ranging from Pasadena to Villafranca to Warsaw in the pipeline, the close interaction with the data providers has also led to very significant improvements to DaCHS' EPN-TAP support. The tutorial chapter on EPN-TAP and the reference documentation linked from there already reflect the results of this workshop. You'll need a current DaCHS beta package for that to work, though; we expect this stuff to go into our release packages around July.

  If any of the workshop participants read this: Thanks a lot for your patience with DaCHS' sometimes somewhat cryptic diagnostics. If, on the other hand, you missed the Graz workshop and have solar system data: Please talk to us or the kind and friendly Europlanet folks – either us will be delighted to support your publication project. And perhaps we'll meet you at the next such workshop, planned for 2018 in the Czech Republic.

« Page 4 / 5 »