LAMOST5 meets Datalink

One of the busiest spectral survey instruments operated right now is the Large Sky Area Multi-Object Fiber Spectrograph Telescope (LAMOST). And its data in the VO, more or less: DR2 and DR3 have been brought into the VO by our Czech colleagues, but since they currently lack resources to update their services to the latest releases, they have kindly given me their DaCHS resource descriptor, and so I had a head start for publishing DR5 in Heidelberg.

With some minor updates, here it is now: Over nine million medium-resolution spectra covering large parts of the northen sky – the spatial coverage is like this:

Coverage Healpix map

There's lots of fun to be had with this; of course, there's an SSA service, so when you point Aladin or Splat at some part of the covered sky and look for spectra, chances are you'll see LAMOST spectra, and when working on some of our tutorials (this one, for example), it happened that LAMOST actually had what I was looking for when writing them.

But I'd like to use the opportunity to mention two other modes of accessing the data.

Stacked spectra

Tablesample and TOPCAT's Plot Table activation action

Say you'd like to look at spectra of M stars and would like to have some sample from across the sky, fire up TOPCAT, point its TAP client the GAVO DC TAP service (http://dc.g-vo.org/tap) and run something like:

select
  ssa_pubDID, accref, raj2000, dej2000, ssa_targsubclass
from lamost5.data tablesample(1)
where
  ssa_targsubclass like 'M%'

This is using the TABLESAMPLE modifier in the from clause, which isn't standard ADQL yet. As mentioned in the DaCHS 1.4 announcement, DaCHS has a prototype implementation of what's been discussed on the IVOA's DAL mailing list: pick a part of a table rather than the full one. It takes a percentage as an argument, and tells the server to choose about this percentage of the table's records using a reasonable and fast heuristic. Note that this won't give you perfect statistical sampling, but if it's not “good enough” for some purpose, I'd like to learn about that purpose.

Drawing a proper statistical sample, on the other hand, would take minutes on the GAVO database server – with tablesample, I had the roughly 6000 spectra the above query returns essentially instantaneously, and from eyeballing a sky plot of them, I'd say their distribution is close enough to that of the full DR5. So: tablesample is your friend.

For a quick look at the spectra themselves, in TOPCAT click Views/Activation Actions, check “Plot Table” and make sure TOPCAT proposes the accref column as “Table Location” (if you don't see these items, update your TOPCAT – it's worth it). Now click on a row or perhaps a dot on a plot and behold an M spectrum.

Zitiert in: We'd still have IDL