Virtual Astronomy Multimedia Project (original) (raw)

The Virtual Astronomy Multimedia Project

2008

The Virtual Astronomy Multimedia Project (VAMP) will enable access to, and vastly multiply the use of, astronomy image resources. VAMP will enable future innovative exploitation of all kinds of outreach media by systematically linking resource archives worldwide.

Virtual Observatory activities in the AMIGA group

The AMIGA project (Analysis of the interstellar Medium of Isolated GAlaxies) is an international collaboration led from the Instituto de Astrof\'isica de Andaluc\'ia (CSIC). The group's experience in radio astronomy databases turned, as a natural evolution, into an active participation in the development of data archives and radio astronomy software. The contributions of the group to the VO have been mostly oriented towards the deployment of large VO compliant databases and the development of access interfaces (IRAM 30m Pico Veleta, DSS-63 70m in Robledo de Chavela). We also have been working in the development of an API for VO tools that will ease access to VO registries and communication between different VO software. A collaboration with the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute has started recently in order to perform a complete renovation of the only existing high-level software (GIPSY) for the analysis of datacubes, allowing its fully integration in the VO.

Astrovirtel—From Archival Research to the Astrophysical Virtual Observatory

Astrophysics and Space Science, 2004

Given the high cost of modern astronomical observing facilities it is evident that efforts must be made to optimally exploit the data in order to maximize the return on investment. This concept was first implemented on a large scale for the Hubble Space Telescope, and has since been taken over for other space borne and large ground-based facilities. The European HST Science Data Archive is located at the European Southern Observatory (ESO). It has been extended to include data from ESO telescopes and instruments, especially the Very Large Telescope (VLT) and Wide Field Imager (WFI). It was thus natural to design the archive such that queries could be extended across its full content, regardless of the origin of the data. This constituted a first step toward a virtual observatory. The Astrovirtel program, first established in 1999–2000 with funding provided by the European Commission, makes it possible for scientists to use this facility for their investigations. At the same time it allowed us to establish science requirements for archive cross queries, and to define capabilities required for VO's. Recently the European Commission decided to provide the funding for the implementation of the Astrophysical Virtual Observatory (AVO). This will include several European observatories and scientific organizations. It is being developed in close coordination with the US National Virtual Observatory.

Science with the Virtual Observatory: the AstroGrid VO Desktop

2009

) and show how to pass the various results into any VO enabled tool such as TopCat for catalogue correlation. VOExplorer offers a powerful data-centric visualisation for browsing and filtering the entire VO registry using an iTunes type interface. This allows the user to bookmark their own personalised lists of resources and to run tasks on the selected resources as desired. We introduce an example of how more advanced querying can be performed to access existing X-ray cluster of galaxies catalogues and then select extended only X-ray sources as candidate clusters of galaxies in the 2XMMi catalogue. Finally we introduce scripted access to VO resources using python with AstroGrid and demonstrate how the user can pass on the results of such a search and correlate with e.g. optical datasets such as Sloan. Hence we illustrate the power of enabling large scale data mining of multi wavelength resources in an easily reproducible way using the VO.

Sharing images intelligently: The Astronomy Vizualisation Metadata standard

2008

High quality astronomical images, accompanied by rich caption and background information, abound on the web and yet prove notoriously difficult to locate efficiently using existing search tools. For instance, "flat" searches will return dozens of hits for low-quality images and miss more important related images from large observatories. The Virtual Astronomy Multimedia Project offers a solution via the Astronomy Visualization Metadata (AVM) standard. VAMP manages the design, implementation, and dissemination of the AVM standard for the education & public outreach (EPO)/press astronomical images that observatories publish.

VisIVO: A Tool for the Virtual Observatory and Grid Environment

2007

We present the new features of VisIVO, software for the visualization and analysis of astrophysical data which can be retrieved from the Virtual Observatory framework and used for cosmological simulations running both on Windows and GNU/Linux platforms. VisIVO is VO standards compliant and supports the most important astronomical data formats such as FITS, HDF5 and VOTables. It is free software

The Virtual Observatory Data, Standards and Tools a technical - user point of view

Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union, 2010

In 2002 the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) has been created in order to gather efforts on data standardization and dissemination. Since then, the virtual Observatory allowed to spread validated data all over the world and to use data from everywhere from earth. From the standards definitions to development of tools, developers have set up a technical infrastructure used by astronomers to easily search for data and make science with all available products, more tools and more confidence on the quality of data. The goal of this review is to present the state of the art of the VO data, standards and tools. This review focuses on basic astronomer's questions : what kind of data are accessible, how to deal with these data and how to use them.

VIRUP : The Virtual Reality Universe Project

ArXiv, 2021

VIRUP is a new C++ open source software that provides an interactive virtual reality environment to navigate through large scientific astrophysical datasets obtained from both observations and simulations. It is tailored to visualize terabytes of data, rendering at 90 frames per second in order to ensure an optimal immersion experience. While VIRUP has initially been designed to work with gaming virtual reality headsets, it supports different modern immersive systems like 3D screens, 180◦ domes or 360◦ panorama. VIRUP is scriptable thanks to the Python language, a feature that allows to immerse visitors through pre-selected scenes or to pre-render sequences to create movies. A companion video 2 to the last SDSS 2020 release as well as a 21 minute long documentary, The Archaeology of Light 3 have been both 100% produced using VIRUP.

The architecture of a multi-tiered virtual observatory

Earth Science Informatics, 2008

Virtual observatories are being established in a wide range a disciplines, supported by a variety of agencies. Groups such as the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA), Planetary Data System (PDS) and the Space Physics Archive Search and Extract (SPASE) consortium are defining metadata standards to aid in archiving and sharing of information resources. The role of the virtual observatories in this resource sharing environment is to locate available resources and help users find the resources they need and then gain access to those resources. There are many different existing resource providers from which virtual observatories must collect descriptions of their resources. These resource providers may have associations with other providers so the topology of information exchange can be complicated. We explore the variety of topologies that can exist and discuss methods of collecting (harvesting) information from providers such as scheduled and on-demand harvesting. We compare the benefits of each approach and look at the issues of management overhead, adaptability and timeliness. We also explore the benefits of combining searching and harvesting services as part of a comprehensive solution.