NAM may have finished last week but we still have a couple of interviews to upload. At the start of the National Astronomy Meeting the latest version of the AstroGrid software was released. Jonathan Tedds of the University of Leicester tells us all about AstroGrid - part of the UK involvement in International Virtual Observatory - which acts like iTunes for astronomers.

Working out how to extract observations from many different telescope’s archives can be a big pain in the neck. Once you’ve tracked down the appropriate archive you then have to work out how the data are stored. Over the years there have probably been as many ways to store and access archive data as there have been archives. Even if you worked out how to get into the archives you still needed to check conventions and units. Something had to be done.

Thankfully, there has been a big push by the global astronomical community to build software and standards that make it easy to exchange archival observations and information in a way that is straight-forward and doesn’t require detailed knowledge of hundreds of different databases and server software packages. This is the astronomical equivalent to the web applications and services that form the much acclaimed Web 2.0.

The Virtual Observatory (VO) session on Tuesday covered large astronomical archives and some of the software tools that are being developed to use them and other astronomy web-services. The archives discussed during the session included existing data for ISO, XMM-Newton and Integral as well as archives for exciting future projects. Amongst those projects is PanSTARRS which will have several 1.4 Gigapixel cameras and survey the entire sky four times per year.

The second aspect of the session was to demonstrate some of the software and toolkits under development. Andy Lawrence described the Astrogrid software that forms part of the UK contribution to the VO. Astrogrid started in 2002 and with user feedback from various prototypes over the years there have been many improvements. The software includes VODesktop, Topcat, and Astrogrid Python. Amongst the other tools Andy mentioned was VOSpace which he described as “a bit like Flickr for astronomy data”.

The Astrogrid tools were officially launched yesterday (as long as that wasn’t some kind of April Fools joke) and they can be downloaded from the website. Astrogrid contains lots of resources - “something you can do something with” - which consist of libraries of images, tables, catalogues, invokeable applications or even a set of information pages. You can search registries, bookmark resources, load data into applications, analyse tables, automate things with scripts, and cross-match catalogues.

At the end of his talk Andy bravely decided to give us a live demo over the conference wireless network. The tool does look very nice and perhaps that it because the interface is partly inspired by iTunes. Andy searched for his favourite galaxy - NGC 4395 - and the program returned a list of catalogues in which observations were found. At the same time , because these services all talk a common language, it returned the coordinates of the galaxy which it had acquired from the excellent Simbad. He then selected some of the data and was given the option to send the data to Aladin - another piece of virtual observatory software that displays FITS images. To be honest, the Astrogrid software actually looks far better than iTunes. It is incredibly extensible and open and has the ability to send data to other applications as necessary. I’ll have to download it and have a play with it next week when I have more time.

Gratuitous image of NGC 4395 from the SDSS.