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Topcat, Top Dog

September 22, 2010 By

Astrobetter has a guest post by Niall “in the gutter” Deacon of the University of Hawaii on one of my favourite pieces of astronomical software, Topcat. Developed as part of the UK’s Virtual Observatory program Astrogrid, Topcat gives astronomers Tools for Operations on Catalogues and Tables. That doesn’t sound very sexy, but for anyone who deals with data from large public surveys or needs to cross-match several large datasets, Topcat is the grease in the cogs of their productivity.

Niall recorded a cool screencast to show off some of Topcat’s functionality, which I’ve embedded above.  There’s also some useful discussion in the comments on Astrobetter, including one from Mark Taylor who actually wrote Topcat.

I use Topcat almost exclusively in conjunction with image viewer Aladin. Connecting the two via the SAMP protocol, which is done at the click of a button, allows you to send targets back and forth between the two, visualise catalog data or create tables from image data. Recent versions of DS9 are also VO-enabled, though I find the VO functionality of Aladin, i.e. searching catalogs, images and archives, more efficient and versatile.

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AstroInformatics I: From Data to Knowledge

June 23, 2010 By

Optical layout of LSST, the catalyst for many semantic headaches

Like many sciences, astronomy is becoming increasingly data-rich. The next generation of observatories, such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, will produce staggering amounts of data every night and push the subject into the petabyte regime. The large surveys that feed a substantial portion of the research community today, such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, are already demonstrating the difficulties of converting large datasets into knowledge: converting the data into catalogues, estimating selection biases and performing robust statistics are all common problems to those working with the data. Astroinformatics, or the science behind the information captured in our wealth of astronomical data, is therefore becoming an increasingly relevant field of study. The AstroInformatics 2010 conference was organised with the aim of essentially defining this emerging field.

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.Astronomy Day 4: Eye candy

December 7, 2009 By

chromoscope

Day 4 at .Astronomy was all about visualisation. Astronomy is arguably the most naturally photogenic of the sciences, even though we don’t know what much of the stuff out there actually is. As technological advances enable wider, deeper, higher-resolution observations, astronomical data become increasingly complex. But data is not knowledge, and the information we can extract from these large multi-dimensional datasets is limited by our ability to visualise and mentally process this complexity. Unfortunately, PhDs don’t give us extra powers over everyone else. Our minds are wired the same as everyone else’s – we just learn how to manipulate data and present them in novel ways that make them make sense to our limited brain.

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.Astronomy Day 2 (Part 1): Drowning in Data

December 3, 2009 By
Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope

Westerbork Synthesis Radio Telescope

I’m a little behind with my updates but I’ll resist the temptation to overly condense all the .Astronomy news into one post – so I’ll stick to day-by-day overviews of the conference. The theme for Tuesday was “web-based research” – looking at how the web has changed the way we actually advance science (rather than just play with it). A thought aside – it seemed like a good idea to allocate a particular theme to each day, but it’s becoming clear to me that there is much overlap between these trends. And this, in fact, is the trend: research in astronomy, and in science in general, is being transformed by the technological advances that allow us to produce, distribute and transmit vast amounts of data and information around the world. Research isn’t “research” anymore, outreach isn’t “outreach”, and scientists aren’t “scientists”. Odd, isn’t it?

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