The ALADIN Interactive Sky Atlas

We present here the Data Explorer tool developed at the ASI Science Data Center (ASDC). This tool is designed to provide an efficient and user-friendly way to display information residing in several catalogs stored in the ASDC servers, to cross-correlate this information and to download/analyze data via our scientific tools and/or external services. Our database includes GRB catalogs (such as Swift and Beppo-SAX), which can be queried through the Data Explorer. The GRB fields...

The SkyServer provides Internet access to the public Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) data for both astronomers and for science education. This paper describes the SkyServer goals and architecture. It also describes our experience operating the SkyServer on the Internet. The SDSS data is public and well-documented so it makes a good test platform for research on database algorithms and performance.

With the goal of simplifying the access to science data to scientists and citizens, ESA recently released ESASky (http://sky.esa.int), a new open-science easy-to-use portal with the science-ready Astronomy data from ESA and other major data providers. In this presentation, we announced version 2.0 of the application, which includes access to all science-ready images, catalogues and spectra, a feature to help planning of future JWST observations, the possibility to search for ...

The increasing volumes of astronomical data require practical methods for data exploration, access and visualisation. The Hierarchical Progressive Survey (HiPS) is a HEALPix based scheme that enables a multi-resolution approach to astronomy data from the individual pixels up to the whole sky. We highlight the decisions and approaches that have been taken to make this scheme a practical solution for managing large volumes of heterogeneous data. Early implementors of this syste...

The Atlasmaker project is using Grid technology, in combination with NVO interoperability, to create new knowledge resources in astronomy. The product is a multi-faceted, multi-dimensional, scientifically trusted image atlas of the sky, made by federating many different surveys at different wavelengths, times, resolutions, polarizations, etc. The Atlasmaker software does resampling and mosaicking of image collections, and is well-suited to operate with the Hyperatlas standard...

The contemporary astronomical instruments have been producing the unprecedented amount of data. The largest part of this "data avalanche" is being produced by deep all-sky surveys yielding terabytes of raw data per night. Such a great data volumes can hardly even been reduced by automatic pipelines running on supercomputer grids but it is impossible to exploit fully their content by a small group of professional astronomers in the interested research teams. New tools for coll...

The Montage Image Mosaic Engine was designed as a scalable toolkit, written in C for performance and portability across *nix platforms, that assembles FITS images into mosaics. The code is freely available and has been widely used in the astronomy and IT communities for research, product generation and for developing next-generation cyber-infrastructure. Recently, it has begun to finding applicability in the field of visualization. This has come about because the toolkit desi...

A (subjective) overview of Internet resources relevant to professional astronomers is given. Special emphasis is put on databases of astronomical objects and servers providing general information, e.g. on astronomical catalogues, finding charts from sky surveys, bibliographies, directories, browsers through multi-wavelength observational archives, etc. Archives of specific observational data will be discussed in more detail in other chapters of this book, dealing with the cor...

Hyperatlas is an open standard intended to facilitate the large-scale federation of image-based data. The subject of hyperatlas is the space of sphere-to-plane projection mappings (the FITS-WCS information), and the standard consists of coherent collections of these on which data can be resampled and thereby federated with other image data. We hope for a distributed effort that will produce a multi-faceted image atlas of the sky, made by federating many different surveys at d...

The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is an ambitious, multi-institutional project to create a huge digital imaging and spectroscopic data bank of 25% of the celestial sphere, approximately 10,000 deg^2 centred on the north galactic polar cap. The photometric atlas will be in 5 specially-chosen colours, covering the pi ster of the Survey area to a limiting magnitude of r~23.1, on 0.4" pixels, resulting in a 1 Tpixel map. This data base will be automatically analysed to catalog the pho...