ADASS2009

Focus Group Presentation Instructions

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:44:41 +0900

Focus Groups are allocated a 30 minute block of time in the oral program, in a private meeting room (B1F Roma). For your demo, you will be provided with:

  * Digital Projector
  * Screen
  * Podium
  * Wireless Internet Connection (DHCP)

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Oral Presentation Instructions

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 16:34:55 +0900

There are two categories of oral presentations: invited and contributed. The time allocations are as follows:

	Presentation	Questions
Invited	25	5
Contributed	12	3

A video projector and computer will be provided for oral sessions. A multi-language version of Windows 7 with Office 2007/OpenOffice/Adobe Acrobat Reader will be provided for presentation use. PowerPoint, OpenOffice, Adobe Acrobat/PDF are the required data formats. As a rule, we would ask that presenters use the computer provided for their presentation.

Please provide your electronic file to a staff member on a USB drive (memory stick) no later than 30 min. prior to the start of the session on the day of your talk. Timely transfer of your file to the presentation computer is essential to verify that there are no problems with your presentation, and to avoid delays between talks.

If you are not able to present in this format or for some reason must use your own computer to present, a separate RGB cable will be provided at the podium for this purpose.

Note:
The Chair of each oral session is responsible to maintain the right timing for each presentation.

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Thu, 17 Sep 2009 13:51:11 +0900

The LOFAR Pulsar Data Pipeline
Anastasia Alexov	University of Amsterdam, Astronomical Institute Anton Pannekoek (API)
The LOw Frequency ARray (LOFAR) for radio astronomy is being built by ASTRON in The Netherlands along with several European collaborators. The project is an interferometric array of radio telescopes arranged in clusters that are spread over an area 350 km in diameter at frequencies below 250 MHz. LOFAR will be a breakthrough in the low frequency radio astronomy science domain. Transient radio phenomena and pulsars are one of six LOFAR Key Science Projects (KSPs). As part of the Transients KSP, the Pulsar Working Group has been developing the LOFAR Pulsar Data Pipeline to look at known pulsars as well as search for pulsars within an all-sky survey. The pipeline is being developed for the Blue Gene/P supercomputer and large Linux cluster in order to utilize enormous amount of computation capabilities and data streams of 23TB/hour. The pipeline output will be using the Hierarchical Data Format 5 (HDF5) to efficiently store large amounts of numerical data. We will present the LOFAR Pulsar Data Pipeline overview, the pulsar beam-formed data format, the status of the pipeline processing as well as our future plans of developing additional Transient-pipelines.

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The construction of the Large Quasar Astrometric Catalogue (LQAC)
Christophe Joel Barache	Observatoire de Paris, Laboratoire Syrte
We gather the 12 largest quasar catalogues (4 from radio interferometry programs, 8 from optical survey) and we carry out systematic cross-identifications of the objects to obtain their best position estimates, and to provide physical information at both optical and radio wavelengths. This catalogue compilation designated LQAC, gives equatorial coordinates of 113666 quasars with magnitudes at 9 bandwidths, 5 radio fluxes, redshift and absolute magnitude. We made use of VO tools like Aladin for preliminary studies. For cross idenfication, data processing and validation, we made use of two different software packages with the same parameters and strategy : VO Topcat with Stilts and homemade Fortran programs.

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From Start to Finish: Python for Space Missions
Paul Barrett	US Naval Observatory
The software development process for many space observatories is often disjoint and inefficient due to the use of multiple languages during the different phases of mission development. Code and algorithms that are often developed using an interactive, array language during the pathfinding efforts of Phase A are often rewritten in a non-interactive, compiled language for use in the production code for Phase C. This approach leads to inefficiency in both development time and cost and can introduce errors during the rewriting process. Python is one programming language that can be used as a high-level, array language and as an efficient, production language. This paper shows how Python will be used during the different phases of development of the Joint Milli-Arcsecond Pathfinder Survey (JMAPS) space mission with an emphasis on code and algorithm reuse from one phase to the next.

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ESA New Generation Science Archives: New technologies applied to Graphical User Interface creation
Monica Fernandez-Barreiro	Science Archives Team (SAT) - ESAC/ESA
The Science Archives and VO Team (SAT) has undertaken the effort to build state of the art sub-systems for its new generation of archives. At the time of writing this abstract, the new technology has already been applied to the creation of the SOHO and EXOSAT Science Archives and will be used to reengineer some of the already existing ESA Science Archives in the future. The Graphical User Interface sub-system has been designed and developed upon the premises of building a lightweight rich client application to query and retrieve scientific data quickly and efficiently; special attention has been paid to the usability and ergonomics of the interface. The system architecture relies on the Model View Controller pattern, which isolates logic from the graphical interface. Multiple window layout arrangements are possible using a docking windows framework with virtually no limitations (InfoNode). New graphical components have been developed to fulfill project-specific user requirements. For example video animations can be generated at runtime based on image data requests matching a specific search criteria. In addition, interoperability is achieved with other tools for data visualization purposes using internationally approved standards (c.f., IVOA SAMP), a messaging protocol already adopted by several analysis tools (ds9, Aladin, Gaia). In order to avoid the increasingly common network constraints affecting the end-user′s daily work the system has been designed to cope with possible restrictive firewall set up. Therefore, ESA New Generation archives are accessible from anyplace where standard basic port 80 HTTP connections are available.

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Advancing Computational Astronomy on Advanced Architectures
Benjamin Robert Barsdell	Swinburne University, Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing
Astronomers have come to rely on the increasing performance of computers to reduce, analyse, simulate and visualise their data. In this environment, faster computation can mean more science outcomes or the opening up of new parameter spaces for investigation. If we are to avoid major issues when implementing codes on advanced architectures, it is important that we have a solid understanding of our algorithms. A recent addition to the high-performance computing scene that highlights this point is the graphics processing unit (GPU). The hardware originally designed for speeding-up graphics rendering in video games is now achieving speed-ups of O(100) in general-purpose computation - performance that cannot be ignored. We are using a generalised approach, based on the analysis of astronomy algorithms, to identify the optimal problem-types and techniques for taking advantage of both current GPU hardware and future developments in computing architectures. Several specific astronomy implementations will be described in addition to the generalised analysis methods.

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Preliminary Wavelength Calibration for Cosmic Origins Spectrograph
Stephane Beland	University of Colorado, Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy
During the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) Servicing Mission Observatory Verification (SMOV), standard stars were observed with the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) and wavelength solutions were obtained for various gratings and central wavelength settings of both the NUV and the FUV detectors. We are presenting here preliminary results of these observations and comparison with what was obtained during the thermal-vaccum tests on the ground before launch.

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Using the AST library to create and use STC-S region descriptions
David Berry	Joint Astronomy Centre, Hawaii
AST is a general purpose library for manipulating coordinate systems stored within astronomical data in various forms (including FITS-WCS). It now includes support for reading and writing WCS information in the IVOA STC-S format, thus making all the power of AST available for manipulating STC-S regions and coordinate systems. These new facilities have been used within the CUPID clump finding package to allow clump catalogues created by CUPID to be more easily used within a VO context.

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Rapid SOA frontend design and prototyping for LINC-NIRVANA
Juergen Berwein	Max Planck Institute for Astronomy
LINC-NIRVANA is a German-Italian Fizeau (imaging) interferometer for the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) on Mt. Graham in Arizona, USA. For laboratory testing and integration, a large number of engineering applications are needed. The process of engineering, testing and integration has to go hand in hand with an agile software development for data display and configuration frontends. Therefore we implemented software packages, which enable a rapid design and prototyping of engineering applications within an SOA oriented environment. Due to the usage of only precompiled software and the easy to handle workflow neither compilation nor programming knowledge is require. We will present the current development status, usage and advantages of our software, which was realized at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany.

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The CDS Portal, a unified way to access CDS services
Thomas Boch	CDS, Observatoire de Strasbourg
The CDS portal is a newly released Web application, which aims at providing a uniform search interface to CDS services (Simbad, VizieR and Aladin). For a given position or object name, the portal returns a summary of available information and data available in the various services. Following the Virtual Observatory (VO) paradigm of ″shifting the results, not the data″, we also provide each user with a private virtual storage space where he can save results obtained from Simbad or VizieR, or upload his own local table. Stored data can later be reused as inputs to other services, cross-identified or saved in VO-compatible formats. The portal has been built as a lightweight application able to run in any modern browser without the need to install a dedicated plugin. It relies upon the Google Web Toolkit technology, an open source framework for Web applications, which was helpful in allowing us to reuse or adapt as much as possible existing HTTP services.

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Management of astronomical software projects with open source tools.
Florian Briegel	Max Planck Institute for Astronomy
In this article we will offer an innovative approach to managing the software development process with free open source tools for building and automated testing (autotools http://sources.redhat.com/autobook/), a system to automate the compile/test cycle on a variety of platforms to validate code changes ( Bitten http://bitten.edgewall.org/ ) using virtualization to compile in parallel on various operating system platforms (Xen http://www.xen.org/), version control and change management (Subversion http://subversion.tigris.org/), enhanced wiki and issue tracking system for online documentation and reporting (Trac http://trac.edgewall.org/) and groupware tools as they are: blog, discussion and calendar(Trac Plugins http://trac-hacks.org/ ).

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A distributed, real-time data monitoring system as ground support equipment for balloon-borne astronomy experiments
C. M. Hubert Chen	California Institute of Technology
We present a real-time data-monitoring software suite that we developed for the High Energy Focusing Telescope (HEFT). HEFT was one of the first projects to develop focusing mirrors and detectors for hard X-ray astronomy. We deployed these new technologies on the scientific ballooning platform. In scientific ballooning, we launch the payload above the atmosphere for a continuous duration of about 30 hours, during which we control and communicate with the payload in real time via a two-way radio link. During flight, software commonly known as ground support equipments (GSEs) allows experiment conductors to monitor the physical condition of the payload, and to display preliminary science data in real time. To this end, GSEs provide capabilities to display tables of frequently updated quantities and their averages, time-series plots, histograms, spectra, and images---all in real time. Unique from previous implementations of GSEs for other experiments, our system is a server-client network that utilises TCP/IP unicast and UDP multicast to enable multiple, concurrent and independent display clients. We wrote most of the code in the platform-independent Java language, and we verified that the software suite works on Linux, Mac OS/X and Windows XP. We deployed the software in two flight campaigns of HEFT in 2004 and 2005, for use during on-site calibration, pre-launch practice drills, and an observation flight of 24 hours. This system, and individual ideas of its implementation, can be adapted for use in future experiments requiring sophisticated real-time monitoring and data display.

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A meta-data layer for astronomical archives
Fabien Chereau	ESO
In many large observatories, meta-data is spread across a variety of sources (databases, text files, personal knowledge), has varying degrees of quality (in terms of completeness, correctness and precision), and operational constraints abound (one cannot risk locking the database with large queries, incorrect meta-data cannot always be corrected). Hence we propose the concept of a ″meta-data layer″ service which will shield the query services from the complexity of data sources. Based on a simple but carefully defined standard, this service aims to be generic enough to be adopted across the VO community, allowing interoperability of the archives at a level not yet possible in the VO.

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The Heliophysics Integrated Observatory HELIO
Andre Csillaghy	U. of Applied Sciences North Western Switzerland, Inst. of 4D Technologies
HELIO is a new Europe-wide, FP7-funded distributed network of services that will address the needs of a broad community of researchers in heliophysics. This new research field explores the ″Sun-Solar System Connection″ and requires the joint exploitation of solar, heliospheric, magnetospheric and ionospheric observations. HELIO will provide the most comprehensive integrated information system in this domain; it will coordinate access to the distributed resources needed by the community, and will provide access to services to mine and analyse the data. HELIO will be designed as a Service-oriented Architecture. The initial infrastructure will include services based on metadata and data servers deployed by the European Grid of Solar Observations (EGSO). We will extend these to address observations from all the disciplines of heliophysics; differences in the way the domains describe and handle the data will be resolved using semantic mapping techniques. Processing and storage services will allow the user to explore the data and create the products that meet stringent standards of interoperability. These capabilities will be orchestrated with the data and metadata services using the Taverna workflow tool. HELIO will address the challenges along the FP7 I3 activities model: (1) Networking: we will cooperate closely with the community to define new standards for heliophysics and the required capabilities of the HELIO system. (2) Services: we will integrate the services developed by the project and other groups to produce an infrastructure that can easily be extended to satisfy the growing and changing needs of the community. (3) Joint Research: we will develop search tools that span disciplinary boundaries and explore new types of user-friendly interfaces HELIO will be a key component of a worldwide effort to integrate heliophysics data and will coordinate closely with international organizations to exploit synergies with complementary domains.

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The ALMA Pipeline Heuristics Package Interface
Lindsey E. Davis	National Radio Astronomy Observatory
The ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter Array) Pipeline Heuristics System (PHS) is designed to automatically reduce data taken in standard observing modes and produce standard data products. The PHS is implemented as a set of Python recipes consisting of a list of high-level reduction stages or tasks, for processing single dish and interferometry data sets and combinations thereof. These scripts run in the CASA (Common Astronomy Software Applications) data reduction environment. The PHS must be available to pipeline core developers, testers, and maintainers, to the pipeline commissioning team, staff at the ALMA regional centers, and to end users who may wish to execute parts of the PHS on their desktops resources permitting. To support this diverse user group the user interface must ensure ease-of-use, yet support complex processing setups for experts, e.g. parallelization of processing steps by source, time, frequency band, etc where appropriate. The initial low-level PHS interfaces for single dish and interferometry were developed independently and in parallel to accommodate the different requirements in each area and to get some basic heuristics algorithms working quickly. Although both interfaces support reduction recipes they diverged in style and the degree to which they supported customization. In this poster we describe a new PHS user interface which will support both single dish and interferometry reductions in a more uniform way and facilitate pipeline customization. This interface is targeted towards ALMA staff who will develop new and improve existing PHS recipes for the standard ALMA pipeline, and at astronomers who may be interested in developing their own reduction pipelines in CASA. The new user commands correspond to the existing PHS stages but are easier to execute interactively and tune. Technically, the user commands are implemented as CASA Python tasks, and look to the user exactly the same as core CASA tasks. Lower level Python commands which can be used to construct new tasks are also available for the expert user.

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Multithreading for ESO Pipelines
Lander de Bilbao	ESO
The second generation of instruments for ESO′s VLT in Paranal will be installed in the near future. These instruments will increase dramatically the volume of raw data per night, which in turn leads to very high computational needs that can be, up to some level, addressed by existing multi-core, shared-memory computers. To fully utilize these multi-processor systems we need to implement a programming environment supporting multi-threaded execution of applications. Such parallel execution needs to be introduced at the level of pipeline recipes as well as within the Common Pipeline Library. (CPL) on which all operational VLT pipelines of ESO are based. We describe our approach to providing such a new, multithreading pipeline setup and evaluate possible implementation solutions with some performance measurements.

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Instrumental Provenance of ESO Archival Data
Arancha Delgado	European Southern Observatory
The ESO Archive contains one of the largest collections of ground-based astronomical data in the world that come from a wide variety of telescopes and other sources and is evolving to become a full research facility capable of optimizing the scientific return from the data. In the Virtual Observatory (VO) era it is critical that the holdings of the ESO Archive are made available to the user community using VO tools. This requires among other things a good knowledge of the instrumental provenance of the data and the identification of metadata from the otherwise inhomogeneous collection to form a VO layer and a provenance database. Also specifications and transmission curves for all optical elements present in the archived observations are being collected for making them available to the astronomical community. As an example, this homogenisation work makes possible the mining of the ESO Archive looking for objects observed using specific filters that allow the creation of new outreach images.

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The HST Exposure Time Calculators: Estimating accurate observing times for HST Observations
Rosa I DiazS	Space Telescope Science Institute
The Exposure Time Calculators is a web application that assists users of the Hubble Space Telescope to predict observing times and signal to noise of mostly any possible object that can be observed by the telescope. Accurate predictions are key to determine the time needed to archive the scientific goals of the observers. It is also used by the contact scientist at STScI, to verify the safety and health of some of the instruments that could be damaged by bright observations. The system is a key tool for proposing and planning HST observations. As a result it must be able to accurately predict observing times or expected signal-to-noise ratios for proposed observations. We discuss the issues that complicate developing a general tool that shares as much commonality for computing exposure times for different instruments while handling all the special issues that individual instruments have. Particular attention will be given to the new features and capabilities that have been added to support the new HST instruments, COS and WFC3.

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NED Spectra Data Service
Jeffery D Jacobson	California Institute of Technology, NED
As part of its on-going contribution to the U.S. Virtual Astronomy Observatory (VAO), the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) has implemented a prototype system to provide access to its growing collection of published spectra of extragalactic objects. The service leverages NEDs existing databases, Apache Tomcat, and the U.S. National Radio Astronomy Observatory Data Access Layer server (DALserver) prototype system provided to the VAO. We present the adaptations made to NED to support the VAO Simple Spectral Access Protocol, the lessons learned in the prototype implementation and plans for NEDs future Spectra Data Service. NED is a service of the California Institute of Technology/Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, provided to the scientific community and the public under contract to the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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The NDF Data Provenance System and Your Archive
Frossie Economou	Joint Astronomy Centre
End users really like to know what was done to their data, especially when they obrain it from semi-anonymous archives or the VO. One way to achieve this is to include metadata in the files indicating what ancestor files were used to produce them, and what the history of processing has been. Because such a system can only work effectively if there is a high level of trust in it, we have integrated provenance and history handling at the infrastructure level, with any Starlink application that is used to process our data automatically honouring and ammending the provenance and history structures. When our data is ingested in the JCMT Science Archive, a subsection of the provenance can be used to enhance search functionality, such as asking for all data that contributed to a particular product.

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The Data Reduction System for GTC/OSIRIS.
Alessandro E. Ederoclite	Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias
I present the online and the offline data reduction system for OSIRIS, the optical multi-mode instrument for GranTeCan. The software is written in Python and invokes PyRAF tasks which have been optimized for the instrument. I review the characteristics of the intrument and of the software. I will also present the improvements which are foreseen for both the instrument and the software. Finally I will give an overview of the integration with GranTeCan′s software. The flexibility of the software makes it easy to be adapted to other telescopes/instruments.

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Development of Image Analysis Software of MAXI
Satoshi Eguchi	Kyoto University, Department of Astronomy
Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image (MAXI) is an X-ray all-sky monitor, attached to the Japanese experiment module Kibo on the International Space Station. The main scientific goals of the MAXI mission include the discovery of X-ray novae followed by prompt alerts to the community (Negoro et al., in this conference), and production of X-ray all-sky maps and new source catalogs with unprecedented sensitivities. To extract the best capabilities of the MAXI mission, we are working on the development of detailed image analysis tools. We utilize maximum likelihood fitting to a projected sky image, where we take account of the complicated detector responses, such as the background and point spread functions (PSFs). The modeling of PSFs, which strongly depend on the orbit and attitude of MAXI, is a key element in the image analysis. In this poster, we present the status of our software development, focusing on the methods of computing the PSFs and their application to the actual data.

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DTS: The NOAO Data Transport System.
Michael Fitzpatrick	NOAO
The Data Transport System (DTS) provides automated, reliable, high-throughput data transfer between the telescopes, archives and pipeline processing systems used by the NOAO centers in the northern and southern hemispheres. DTS uses an XML-RPC architecture to eliminate the need for persistent connections between the sites, allowing each site to provide or consume services within the network only as needed. The RPC architecture also permits remote control (e.g. to enable a new data queue or manually transmit a file) and monitoring of each system, and for client applications to be language-independent (e.g. a web interface to display transfer status or a task to queue data which is more tightly coupled with the acquisition system being used). The DTS service daemon is highly multi-threaded and capable of managing many different data paths and scheduling priorities, all of which can be easily configured or extended as needed. Bulk data transport is independent of the primary command-and-control methods; a variety of transfer protocols are supported to take best advantage of the bandwidth or properties of the data being moved (e.g. large image size versus many small files). The default transport method uses parallel TCP/IP sockets to ″stripe″ the data to a remote machine, providing a significant improvement in throughput over slow or busy networks. Additional transport protocols will be added in the future.

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History and future of the STScI DADS archive system.
Niall Ives Gaffney	Space Telescope Science Institute
For more than 15 years, the archive at STScI has revolved around DADS (Data Archive and Distribution System). Originally a software product delivered by Loral, this system has evolved to keep up with new technologies and users needs. This evolution has encompassed changes in the core language from C++ to Java, changes of OSes including moving from VMS to *nix, several transitions of the archive storage media, and the inclusion of on the fly processing for current instruments as well as reprocessing of heritage instruments. This evolution has also been driven by other missions archived by DADS (FUSE and Kepler) and expansion into the future with our JWST development. Currently we are transitioning from Sybase to SQLServer as our DB platform and Solaris to RHEL as our base OS. From this history and near future plans, we will present our list of both lessons learned and share common ideas needed to make more flexible and perhaps shareable archive components for the astronomical community.

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A Concept for JDEM Science Computing and Operations
Erik Edward Gottschalk	Fermilab
We describe the status of a conceptual design for science computing and operations for the Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM). An overview of the design will be presented with emphasis on a framework for software development, data management, data processing, and data analysis in today′s distributed computing environment. Initial results from R&D on evaluating a large, scaleable database product, and quality control in a grid computing environment will be discussed. The successful deployment of grid computing and remote operations centers in high-energy physics as a possible model for JDEM will be explored.

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HLA Footprints for Multi-Purpose Science
Gretchen R Greene	STScI
Footprints from the science observations of the Hubble Space Telescope are defined by a set of hierarchical geometric regions of instrument coverage; exposures, combined observations, high level science products, and mosaics. In the growing global community of networked applications, the science end-user has several use cases for visualizing and accessing footprint data including scientific proposal preparation, research and analysis of generated science products, and interoperability between archives for correlation of coverage. The Hubble Legacy Archive (HLA) at Space Telescope Science Institute, in coordination with ESO-ECF and CADC, has developed a web based science user interface built on a VO service oriented architecture system to enable varying levels of astronomical community access to science products derived from the HST archive. In this ADASS poster paper we describe new features and technologies for the HLA footprint component web browser visualization tool and the underyling footprint services utilized by the HST Astronomers Proposal Tool (APT) in compliance with an IVOA standard data access protocol. The service infrastructure is based on a high performance spherical geometric model developed by Johns Hopkins University (JHU) and database search algorithms co-developed by STScI and JHU.

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Pointing the SOFIA Telescope
Michael A. K. Gross	Universities Space Research Association
SOFIA is an airborne, gyroscopically stabilized 2.5m infrared telescope, mounted to a spherical bearing. Unlike its predecessors, SOFIA will work in absolute coordinates, despite its continually changing position. In order to manage this, the telescope must relate equatorial coordinates to its gyroscopes using a combination of avionics data and star identification, manage field rotation and track sky images. As a telescope mounted to a platform in continuous three-dimensional motion during observation, this presents unique pointing challenges. We describe the algorithms and systems required to acquire and maintain the equatorial reference frame, to relate it to tracking imagers and the science instrument, to set up the oscillating secondary mirror, and to aggregate pointings into larger relocatable building blocks such as nods and dithers.

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HST Cache: Update
Jonas Haase	ST-ECF
The HST Cache system at CADC and ESO/ST-ECF has been in operarations for little more than a year now. In than time has the Cache system has fulfilled our expectations and has proven itself to be a excellent vehicle to re-process and serve HST data. This poster reports lessons learned, covers the status of the HST Cache holdings and details the new developments in the associated software.

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The study of the mechanism of cumulative generation of streams for the model of active astronomical object.
Kirill A. Halin	Stavropol State University, Department of Physics
The study introduces research of a purely hydrodynamic model of active astronomical object put forth by Vladimir Vitkovskiy in 2001. It defines the principles of creation on its basis of a mathematical model for carrying out of the numerical experiments promoting studying and understanding of physical processes in active objects of different types. The basic mechanism of activity in the model is the cumulative process arising from the accretion of surrounding substance on the poles of rotating object in a cone-shaped funnel. In the substance under accretion hydrogen prevails. Falling on a star surface, hydrogen accumulates and heats up to the temperature at which thermonuclear reaction of transformation of hydrogen in helium begins. When the speed of produced warmth of nuclear reaction exceeds the speed of a heat being conducted off, thermal instability develops and the explosion occurs. Such scheme is possible provided there is a gas cloud around a star which density is much more than density of the interstellar environment, or the star is a part of a close double system and the overflowing mechanism operates. However, as the research of an actually unlimited cumulative action shows (E.Zababahin and I.Zababahin, 1988), this mechanism can characterise the process of accumulation of the substance, necessary for the description of the offered model (V.Vitkovskiy and K.Halin, 2008).

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GPU-Based Volume Rendering of Noisy Multi-Spectral Astronomical Data
Amr Hassan	Centre for astrophysics and supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology - Melbourne , Australia
Traditional analysis techniques may not be sufficient for astronomers to make the best use of the data sets that current and future instruments, such as the Square Kilometre Array and its Pathfinders, will produce. By utilizing the incredible pattern-recognition ability of the human mind, scientific visualization provides an excellent opportunity for astronomers to gain valuable new insight and understanding of their data, particularly when used interactively in 3D. The goal of our work is to establish the feasibility of a real-time 3D monitoring system for data going into the Australian SKA Pathfinder archive. Based on CUDA, an increasingly popular development tool, our work utilizes the massively parallel architecture of modern graphics processing units (GPUs) to provide astronomers with an interactive 3D volume rendering for multi-spectral data sets. Unlike other approaches, we are targeting real time interactive visualization of datasets larger than GPU memory while giving special attention to data with low signal to noise ratio - two critical aspects for astronomy that are missing from most existing scientific visualization software packages. Our framework enables the astronomer to interact with the geometrical representation of the data, to control the volume rendering process to generate a better data representation of their datasets, and to use cut plane and probing functionality.

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Reusable state machine code generator
Arturo A. Hoffstadt	Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria, Computer Systems Research Group
The State Machine model is frequently used to represent the behavior of a system, allowing one to express and execute this behavior in a deterministic way. A graphical representation such as a UML State Chart diagram tames the complexity of the system, thus facilitating changes to the model and communication between developers and domain experts. We present a reusable state machine code generator, developed by the Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria and the European Southern Observatory. The generator itself is based on the open source project openArchitectureWare, and uses UML State Chart models as input. This allows for a modular design and a clean separation between generator and generated code. The generated state machine code has well-defined interfaces that are independent of the implementation artifacts such as the middleware. This allows using the generator in the substantially different observatory software of the Atacama Large Millimeter Array and the ESO Very Large Telescope. A project-specific mapping layer for event and transition notification connects the state machine code to its environment, which can be the Common Software of these projects, or any other project. This approach even allows to automatically create tests for a generated state machine, using techniques from software testing, such as path-coverage.

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Virtual Observatory Services at WFAU
Mark S Holliman	University of Edinburgh, Institute for Astronomy, Wide Field Astronomy Unit
The Wide Field Astronomy Unit hosts a large number of Virtual Observatory (VO) services that enable access to both data and processing applications housed on our servers in Edinburgh. These services provide astronomers with a powerful set of tools for obtaining and processing data in ways unattainable through conventional access methods. The services offered include cone-search and ADQL access to a number of major databases developed by our data centre such as UKIDSS, SuperCOSMOS Science Archive, and the 6dF Galaxy Survey, and also many mirrors of important databases developed elsewhere, such as SDSS, IRAS, and 2XMM . Images for UKIDSS and SuperCOSMOS are accessible through SIA services. There are useful data processing tools like the STILTS library for table manipulation, a data mining tool for classification using kernel density analysis, and a service for converting VOTables into KML for use in Google Sky. Also hosted are a number of VO infrastructure services like a full registry and VOSpace that enable users to find resources and store data in an online accessible location. WFAU provides secured VO services to the proprietary UKIDSS releases, which are the first secured VO services for a major proprietary data resource in the entire VO. With a limited knowledge of python and a copy of the VODesktop software astronomers can script up workflows that utilize these services to perform complex operations like cross matching between disparate datasets or extracting catalogues from images remotely. Since many of our databases are too large to be downloaded and accessed locally these services make it possible to accomplish complicated tasks online and on dedicated hardware. WFAU′s list of VO services will continue to grow as new IVOA standards are implemented and with the addition of new datasets like the VISTA surveys.

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Planck Surveyor Mission: Methods for Optimizing the Data Analysis with the Software Infrastructure ProC
Wolfgang Hovest	Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics
Scientific workflows are usually controlled by many parameters, and assigning near-optimal values to these is often critical for efficiently finding solutions to goal-oriented problems. Such problems are typically solved by running sophisticated simulation or data analysis workflows. We present two techniques to support scientists which are integrated into the Process Coordinator (ProC) -- the general purpose scientific workflow engine originally developed for the Planck Surveyor satellite mission. The resume functionality allows to repeatedly execute workflows without recalculating already obtained results, for example after the change of parameters of a part of the workflow, or after a crash, e.g. due to network problems. The sampling framework supports the exploration of high-dimensional parameter spaces for function representation, optimization, or integration purposes. Complemented by one of several pluggable sampling algorithms, a sampler control element (SCE) drives the exploration process in multiple cycles. The whole sampling framework has been tested with different sampling algorithm plug-ins, and is ready for use in astrophysical research.

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XMM-Newton Science Analysis Software: Further development and maintenance... and also thinking about the future.
Aitor L. Ibarra	XMM-Newton SOC. ESAC/ESA
The Science Analysis Software (SAS) is a robust software package designed to analyse XMM-Newton data. Coded mainly in C++ and F90 and now almost ten years old, it is still developing, both by extending functionalities and by keeping in line with evolving platforms, compilers and third-party software. At the same time, the XMM-Newton SAS team is working to apply new technologies around SAS to offer observers in the years to come a real XXI century application, making possible XMM-Newton data access, minimizing maintenance costs, while preserving full analysis capabilities going forward. A modern web application based on SAS is in development under the name of RISA (Remote Interface for Science Analysis), combining Virtual Observatory techniques, use of GRID and Cloud computing technologies as well as virtual-machine encapsulation concepts.

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MAXI Nova Search and Alert System
Ryoji Ishiwata	Nihon University
Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image (MAXI) is the first astronomical observatory on the International Space Station (ISS). Its cameras, with wide FOVs, continuously scan all-sky every 96 minutes synchronized with the ISS orbit. Each X-ray photon event downlinked from the ISS is stored into a PostgreSQL database, and simultaneously processed by Nova Search and Alert System in order to discovery X-ray novae or transients and report these phenomena to astronomers worldwide for further follow-up observations. In the Nova Search systems, time variabilities are investigated for each celestial pixel with the HEALPix on various timescales. In addition to the algorithm to detect significant changes in X-ray counts, the system has a graphical user interface employing GTK+ and shows us dynamically-changed image or light curve. Events detected by the Nova Search systems are verified in the alert system. In the system, individual detection data received from the Nova Search systems through socket connection are assembled. After investigation with some additional information unconsidered in the Nova Search systems, such as X-ray counts in neighboring pixels, known objects in catalogs, and the effect of the ISS solar paddle, the system or a duty scientist makes a final judgment on whether the event is a true transient or not. In automatic data processing, the alert will be transmitted in less than 30 seconds after the on-board detection. It is possible to study data in detail through access to the database. We will present the operations and the performances.

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Starlink Software Developments: The Nanahope Release
Tim Jenness	Joint Astronomy Centre
We discuss recent developments to the Starlink Software Collection that were part of the Nanahope release in the summer of 2009. The Starlink Software is very portable and can run on a number of operating systems, including Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris, in both 32- and 64-bit variants. CUPID, our clump detection application, has been extended to support the creation of VO tables containing STC-S region definitions and we have made a number of enhancements to our automatic data provenance tracking system. GAIA, our data visualisation tool, is now VO-enabled and has new facilities for inspecting irregular clumps of emission in 2 and 3D. SPLAT-VO and GAIA have also been enhanced to understand the SAMP protocol.

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A new generic way to define astrometric calibration for Gaia data processing.
Emmanuel Joliet	esac/esa
Gaia is ESA′s ambitious space astrometry mission with a foreseen launch date in early 2012. Its main objective is to perform a stellar census of the 1000 Million brightest objects in our galaxy (completeness to V=20 mag) from which an astrometric catalog of micro-arcsec level accuracy will be constructed. A key element in this endeavor is the Astrometric Global Iterative Solution (AGIS) --- the mathematical and numerical framework for combining the approx. 70 available observations per star obtained during Gaia′s 5yr lifetime into a single global astrometic solution. The fundamental working principles of AGIS was shown (O4.1) at last year′s ADASS XVIII. This time we present a new generic astrometric calibration scheme recently implemented in AGIS. For the development of the data processing software, the traditional astrometric calibration scheme is a heavy task as each new change in the model produces changes in the code, a need for new simulation data, new validations tests, etc. The new scheme allows the calibration of the astrometric instrument to be specified in a more generic and flexible manner. The entire model is defined with an external configuration file that can be modified at any time with no or only minimal impacts on the software. The implementation results in acceptable run time overheads compared to the direct approach with a fixed hard-coded calibration model. This new approach can be a starting point to convert other fixed and hard coded scheme into this more analytical breakdown solution.

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How to get MAXI data from http://maxi.riken.jp ?
Mitsuhiro Kohama	Cosmic Radiation lab. RIKEN
Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image (MAXI) was launched successfully by Space Shuttle ″STS-127 Endevour″ at 06:03 EDT on July 15. MAXI will observe the entire of sky all time with X-ray band on the International Space Station. The products of MAXI will notify the dynamic variability of the various X-ray sources to you at just in time. For that purpose,the MAXI data are automatically processed on the ground station. New MAXI products will be updated in the web site ″http://maxi.riken.jp″. When it discovers a transient, an alert will be issued to observers world-wide within 1min. This is the tutorial paper that ″how to get the MAXI products″.

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aXeTwoZero: The next generation of aXe
Martin Kuemmel	Space Telescope - European Coordinating Facility
The aXe spectral extraction software was designed to extract spectra from slitless data such as taken with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) on board of Hubble. Since its first release in 2002, aXe was significantly extended and developed into the standard reduction package for all ACS slitless modes. Wide Field Camera 3, which was installed on Hubble during Service Mission 4 in May 2009, also contains slitless spectroscopic modes on both, the IR and the UVIS arm, and aXe is the recommended tool for reducing its slitless images. Rather than ′only′ adjusting the current version aXe-1.71 to WFC3, we have chosen to re-factorize the current aXe to build aXeTwoZero (aXeTZ), the next generation of the aXe software. Besides being capable of reducing WFC3 data, aXeTZ characterized by: backward compatibility to aXe-1.71; a homogeneous and ′pythonic′ software design; complete 64bit compatibility; extended functionality. In this contribution we introduce aXeTZ and explain its design criteria and new features. aXeTZ contains a new version of aXedrizzle, which allows the rejection of cosmic ray hits based solely on spectroscopic criteria, and its properties are discussed in detail. The reduction of WFC3 data with aXeTZ is demonstrated using early in-orbit calibration data. aXeTZ is scheduled to be released as part of the next STSDAS release at the end of 2009.

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Faster, better, cheaper: News on seeking Gaia's Astrometric Solution with AGIS
Uwe Lammers	European Space Astronomy Centre of ESA
Gaia is ESA′s ambitious space astrometry mission with a foreseen launch date in early 2012. Its main objective is to perform a stellar census of the 1000 Million brightest objects in our galaxy from which an astrometric catalog of micro-arcsec level accuracy will be constructed. The Astrometric Global Iterative Solution (AGIS) is the mathematical and numerical framework for creating the astrometric core solution. At last year′s ADASS XVIII we presented (O4.1) the working principles of AGIS, its development status, and selected results obtained with large-scale simulated data sets. We present here the latest developments around AGIS highlighting in particular a much improved algebraic solving method that has recently been implemented. This Conjugate Gradient scheme improves the convergence behavior in significant ways and leads to a solution of much higher scientific quality.

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ESA Archives and VO tools: without frontiers.
ANDREA LARUELO	ESAC/ESA
The Science Archives and VO Team (SAT) at ESAC, Madrid, is in charge of the challenging task of developing tools for easy, fast and friendly access to scientific data. Scientific archives and VO tools developed by the SAT are continuously evolving under the idea of flexibility, extensibility and adaptability. The resulting infrastructure is usable for data coming from a wide variety of space based missions. One of the objectives of the SAT group within the VO context is to implement interoperability solutions among services using message brokers (like the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) SAMP protocol). This allows users to explore a wide variety of scientific data and its further analysis through suitable analysis tools. Within services developed by SAT we can see examples of this evolution. The spectra visualization and analysis tool,VOSpec, is already integrated with Herschel Interactive Processing Environment (HIPE) through the aforementioned SAMP protocol. In fact, first Herschel spectra have already been displayed using this VO tool. Recently reengineered SOHO archive is also able to send images to any VO SAMP compatible application and will soon be able to send 1D spectra to VOSpec tool through SAMP. As mentioned above, SAT is also in charge of the design and development of VO tools. As example of the progress of such tools within the context of interoperability and highly distributed data, we present Best Fit algorithm. This functionality is already integrated in VOSpec and helps scientists to find the theoretical model that best fits a given Spectral Energy Distribution.

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ESA New Generation Science Archives: State of the art data management techniques for SOHO and EXOSAT Science Archives
Ignacio Leon	Science Archives Team (SAT) - ESAC/ESA
The Science Archives and VO Team (SAT) has undertaken the effort to build state of the art sub-systems for its new generation of archives. At the time of writing this abstract, the new technology has already been applied to the creation of the SOHO and EXOSAT Science Archives and will be used to reengineer some of the already existing ESA Science Archives in the future. The Data Layer infrastructure required for the archives has very precise requirements. They include a high granularity of data with millions of searchable elements that require short response times. To achieve the goal of delivering an efficient and reliable access, open source technology has been used. Some of these tools are Postgresql (database), Spring (application framework) or Hibernate (persistence framework). On top of these software solutions, the SAT team has added its own software. It groups all these technologies and provides additional functionality to access both data and metadata. Once the data is prepared for distribution, access rights are controlled by using a virtual ftp access, redirected through ftp (to avoid typical network restrictions problems). In its role of data provider, new archives can create animations using image files which are delivered to the clients through http access. These animations are created on the fly, on a per request basis. The access to metadata is done through state of the art software, which provides Connection Pooling, Statement Pooling, Distributed Query & Objects cache. Additionally, the SAT team has applied Dijkstra graph theory search algorithm which is executed at run time to optimice table joins ordering in the database. And in cases where geometrical data is involved, spherical data types, functions and operators (indexed by GIST R-Tree) are used for geometrical searches (c.f., PgSphere)

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An End-to-End Solution for Archiving, Monitoring, Retrieval, and Post-Processing Archive Files for SOFIA
Lan Lin	Universities Space Research Association
The Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) is an airborne astronomical observatory comprised of a 2.5 meter infrared telescope mounted in the aft section of a Boeing 747SP aircraft that will fly at operational altitudes between 37,000 and 45,00 feet, above 99% of atmospheric water vapor. During each mission, the Mission Control and Communication System (MCCS), Telescope Assembly (TA) Subsystems, Flight Management Subsystems, Water Vapor Monitor, Cavity Door Drive Systems, and tracker cameras generate large amounts of housekeeping data. These subsystems reside on different hosts and record data at different frequencies as high as 50 Hz into local disks. The TA Tracker Subsystem alone logs more than 2500 data items at 20 HZ each, creating 400 kilobytes of data each second. It is imperative to archive the housekeeping data from the observatory subsystems post-flight in order to assess observatory performance and to support observatory troubleshooting and improvements. In addition, access to the data must be straightforward so that observatory staff can conduct data analysis tasks quickly and easily. The Archive Manager is designed as an integrated tool to perform four major functions: first, monitor the archiving status; second, control the archiving progress; third, make backups at a separate location; and fourth, manage a data manifest for end of flight processing and future data retrieval. The Archive Manager must carry out these functions without impeding the response time of the system as a whole (round trip command/response time must be less than 20 ms). The performance requirement is achieved by the Archive Manager using backup design that moves large blocks of data at lower frequency instead of small chunks at high frequency. In addition, the Archive Manager itself serves as a subsystem data source that distributes the overall archive information throughout the system. This ensures that the mission director, telescope operator, and observers all have the same mission view during the flight. The Archive Manager was implemented using C++, CORBA and Java as part of the now-retired Mission Control Subsystem for SOFIA. Nonetheless, it should be possible to deploy the Archive Manager into the MCCS software environment with some updates. The Archive Manager automatically prepares the housekeeping data files for ingestion into the SOFIA Data Cycle System Archive. At the end of a flight, the archive data files are transferred off the aircraft and ingested into the archive where they are made available to SOFIA Science and Mission Operations Staff via a simple web page interface. Once downloaded to the users desktop, the files can be opened and analyzed using the Archive Post-Processing Tool which provides a number of data analysis functions. The Archive Manager, DCS Archive, and Archive Post-Processing Tool provide and integrated solution for capturing, archiving, retrieving, and analyzing the huge volumes of housekeeping data produced by the SOFIA observatory subsystems.

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A Reference Architecture Specification of a Generic Telescope Control System
Joao S. Lopez	Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria
A Telescope Control System (TCS) is a software responsible of controlling the hardware that an astronomical observation needs. The automation and sophistication of these observations has produced complex systems. Currently, a TCS is compound by software components that interact with several users and even with other systems and instruments. Each observatory has successfully developed a wide spectrum of TCS solutions to their telescopes. Regardless the mount, there are common patterns in the software components that all these telescopes use. As almost every telescope is custom designed, these patterns are reimplemented again and again for each telescope. This is indeed an opportunity of reuse and collaboration. The Generic Telescope Control System (gTCS) pretends to be a base distributed framework for the developing and deployment of the TCS of any telescope, independent of its physical structure, the type of mount and instrumentation that they use. This work presents an architecture specification explained through two complementary approaches: the layers perspective and the deployment perspective. The first approach defines a set of layers, one on the top of the other, offering different levels of abstraction. Meanwhile the deployment perspective intends to illustrate how the system could be deployed, focused on the distributed nature of the devices.

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Data processing for AKARI Far-Infrared All-Sky Catalogue
Sin'itirou Makiuti	Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency
AKARI is the second space mission for infrared astronomy in Japan. It was launched into space by a M-V rocket on February 22, 2006 (JST). The satellite had a 68.5cm telescope cooled down to 6 K, and observed by two instruments; the Infrared Camera (IRC; 1.8-26.5 micron) and the Far-Infrared Surveyor (FIS; 50-180 micron). One of the key objectives of the AKARI mission is to carry out an all-sky survey in the mid- and far-infrared and construct point source catalogues. IRAS (Infrared Astronomical Satellite, launched in 1983 by USA, UK, and the Netherlands) carried out the first all-sky survey at four infrared wavelengths and provided infrared source catalogues. The AKARI All-Sky Survey surpass the IRAS survey in higher spatial resolution, better sensitivity, and broader wavelength coverage. Data processing for the AKARI far-infrared survey has been constructed on IDL (Interactive Data Language - ITT Visual Information Solutions). We developed pipeline programs to handle time-line signals obtained by the AKARI/FIS and tools such as a data browser basically on the IDL-based platform. The AKARI/FIS has two far-infrared onboard detectors; SW for shorter (<= 100 micron) and LW for longer (>= 100 micron) wavelengths. Each detector is divided into two photometric bands. Number of detectors pixels are 100 for SW and 75 for LW. Each pixel generates time-line signal independently along the scan paths on the sky. The data from the FIS need to be calibrated and corrected to be treat as uniform and continuous data in the source extraction and photometry process. A semiconductor detector for the far-infrared observations is easily affected by cosmic-rays and incoming photon flux itself, and shows significant variation of its responsivity in the space environments. We need to perform several essential processing; removal of the erratic signals caused by incessant cosmic-ray hitting, correction of the non-linear characteristics of the read-out circuit, time dependent dark subtraction and flat-fielding, and so on. We have been developing a software pipeline system to do those data reductions. The system consists with sequence of separated programs each of which has specific function in data processing. Moreover, we have designed a dedicated data file format as the interface between pipeline modules. In this paper, we outline the data-flow of the pipeline system, explain some details of essential part of the processing, and introduce a far-infrared All-Sky Point Source Catalogue (beta version). The revised version catalogue will be in public autumn 2009.

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Spectra extraction and analysis software for the Digitized First Byurakan Survey (DFBS) and research projects
Areg Martin Mickaelian	Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory (BAO)
The Digitized First Byurakan Survey (DFBS) is the largest Armenian astronomical database and is unique in the world for its specific requirements to the extraction and analysis of its low-dispersion prism spectra. The project is a collaboration between the Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory, ″La Sapienza″ Universita di Roma, Cornell University, and VO-Paris. A dedicated software bSpec was created by one of the authors (GC) to extract and measure all spectra in any field of the DFBS. However, more accurate software EXATODS (Extraction and Analysis TOol of DFBS Spectra) was recently written by another author (AS) and have successfully been used for the extraction and study of the asteroids spectra from the DFBS. It scans full plate to find bright spectra and measures the angle of the rotation of each individual spectrum and follows the direction for the dispersion to obtain the correct wavelength calibration. We have developed a dedicated workflow in the VO framework. We will describe these software and present future research possibilities based on the DFBS spectra.

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TGCat, The Chandra Transmission Grating Catalog and Archive
Arik William Mitschang	SAO
The newly released Chandra Transmission Grating Catalog and Archive, TGCat, presents a fully dynamic online catalog allowing users to browse and categorize Chandra gratings observations quickly and easily, generate custom plots of resulting response corrected spectra online without the need for special software and to download analysis ready products from multiple observations in one convenient operation. TGCat has been designed to take advantage of the convenience and power of modern browsers and servers to not only enrich the features available but also provide better access to helpful resources relating to searches and returned values. TGCat has been registered as a VO resource with the NVO providing direct access to the catalogs interface. Currently under development are Simple Cone Search and a Simple Image Access interfaces compliant with NVO standards and we intend to provide spectra via the Simple Spectral Access protocol. The catalog is supported by a back-end designed to automatically fetch newly public data, process , archive and catalog them, At the same time utilizing an advanced queue system integrated into the archive′s MySQL database allowing large processing projects including reprocessing, several planned feature additions, and the event of catastrophic data loss, to take advantage of an unlimited number of CPUs across a network. A unique feature of the catalog is that all of the high level functions used to retrieve inputs from the Chandra archive and to generate the final data products are available to the user in an S-Lang written library with detailed documentation. Here we present a structural overview of the Systems, Design, and Accessibility features of the catalog and archive.

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VO compliant visualization of theoretical data
Marco Molinaro	INAF - Trieste Astronomical Observatory
In the evolving scenario for the inclusion of theoretical and simulated data in the VO, some improvements within the Italian Theoretical Virtual Observatory (ITVO) project are presented. They include cosmological simulated data archives and services (at Trieste and Catania Astronomical Observatories and at the CINECA supercomputing centre in Bologna) and stellar simulations data archives and services (BaSTI, a Bag of Stellar Tracks and Isochrones, maintained at the Teramo Astronomical Observatory). Following an upgrade in BaSTI database and a new Web service endpoint for VisIVOweb in Trieste some improvements in data visualization are presented: from new plots for BaSTI tracks emphasizing star evolution′s key points to their comparison with observational data, from direct 3D visualization of galaxy clusters to their direct online data manipulation server side using the VO-compliant VisIVOWeb service. Finally we present a new unique Web portal for the ITVO project under VObs.it, the Italian effort in the VO world, that collects all information regarding the various tokens of this theoretical virtual observatory project that are spread all over Italy.

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Optimizing Spatial Frequency Data Weights for High Precision Imaging with ALMA
Koh-Ichiro Morita	National Astronomical Observatory Japan
One of the top level technical goals of ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter / submillimeter Array) is to provide high precision images at millimeter and submillimeter wavelengths. For this goal, ALMA is designed to provide complete sampling in spatial frequency domain from zero to maximum spacing. Since the interferometric observations with 50 x 12 m antennas (major part of ALMA) is hard to measure spatial frequency data shorter than 15 m, 2 additional observing mode will be used to measure very short spacing visibility data. Zero spacing data will be measured by single dish observing mode with several 12 m antennas. For the short spacing data from 6 m to 15 m, we are planning to use interferometric observations with ACA (a subsystem of ALMA) which consists of 12 7-m antennas. Imaging process from these data is more complex than that for a simple interferometry. In particular, we need to apply appropriate weights for these data in spatial frequency domain. This report discuss the imaging procedure and how to optimize these weights and its effect on image quality.

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A Prototype Data Processing System for JDEM
Eric Hildaur Neilsen	Fermilab
Fermilab is developing a prototype data processing system for the Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM) Science Operations Center (SOC). The SOC requires tools for systematic and timely execution of computing jobs; data management; and systematic record keeping for provenance, workflow organization, and quality control. Drawing on our experience in processing large volumes of data, we have constructed a prototype system using a variety of existing tools, including Fermilab′s distributed computing and mass data storage infrastructure. This system provides an environment within and against which potential architectures and components of the production system can be evaluated. We describe the prototype and its operation, and discuss future directions.

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MSOTCS: A new Telescope Control System for the Australian National University's 2.3m telescope at Siding Spring Observatory
Jon G. Nielsen	Australian National University, Research School of Astronomy and Astrophysics, Mount Stromlo Observatory
A new telescope control system, MSOTCS, has been written for the ANU′s 2.3m telescope at Siding Spring Observatory. The system has now been in use for approximately 12 months. An overview of the software, whilst in the early stages of development, was presented at ADASS 2004. In this paper we reflect upon those initial design decisions, discuss the development process and subsequent deployment of the system, and look at the experiences of running the system over the past year. Two areas have been chosen for more detailed discussion. Firstly one of the key features designed into MSOTCS, support for remote and automated observing, is considered. The implications of supporting this style of observing are followed from the initial design, to the implementation, and finally through to the deployment and ongoing support of the system. Secondly we discuss the choice of deployment platform for MSOTCS and contrast our choice, QNX, with other alternatives.

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High-speed Korea-Japan Joint VLBI Correlator(KJJVC) development and its current progress
Se-Jin Oh	Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute
The development of Korea-Japan Joint VLBI Correlator (KJJVC) is being progressed in close cooperation with Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute and National Astronomical Observatory of Japan for Korean VLBI Network (KVN), Korea-Japan Joint VLBI Network (KJJVN), East-Asian VLBI Network (EAVN) including VSOP2. KJJVC is able to perform 8Gbps/station data rate, 16 stations with 8192 output channels. It consists of various playback systems, Raw VLBI Data Buffer (RVDB) system, VLBI Correlation Subsystem (VCS), Peta-scale Epoch Data Archive (PEDA) system, and control and operation software. In case of playback systems, there are many different type of playback system in East-Asian VLBI Network as like Mark5B, VERA2000, and K5 system. And RVDB system will be able to play back the observed data to VCS with same time from various playback systems. VCS is a core product in KJJVC for processing the correlation of data. PEDA is massive data storage to save the correlated results from VCS. It can also support e-VLBI through next generation Gigabit network. The factory and field inspection of VCS was performed and VCS was installed at VLBI Correlator room in June and August 2009, respectively. The overall system integration work will be performed until end of 2009. The Korea-Japan Joint Correlation Center will be opened in Korea next year. In this paper, KJJVC development and its current status will be shown in detail.

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Toward a reference implementation of a standardized astronomical software environment.
Luigi Paioro	INAF-IASF Milano
The OPTICON Network 3.6 (FP6) and the US NVO, coordinating with international partners and the Virtual Observatory, have already identified high-level requirements and a global architectural design for a future astronomical software environment. In order to continue this project and demonstrate the concepts outlined, the new OPTICON Network 9.2 (FP7) was born and is working on a concrete prototype which is meant to contribute to development of an eventual reference implementation of the basic core system to be jointly developed by the major partners. As the reference implementation stabilizes, we plan to work with selected groups within the astronomical community to port software to test the new environment and provide feedback for its further evolution. These groups will include both producers of new software as well as the major legacy systems (e.g. AIPS, CASA, IRAF/PyRAF, Starlink and ESO Common Pipeline Library).

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Development of the software for high speed data transfer of the > > high-speed, large capacity data archive system for the storage of the correlation data from Korea - Japan Joint VLBI Correlator(KJJVC)
Sunyoup Park	Korea Astronomy & Space Science Institute (KASI)
Korea-Japan Joint VLBI Correlator (KJJVC), to be used for Korean VLBI Network (KVN) in Korea Astronomy & Space Science Institute (KASI), is a high-speed calculator that outputs the correlation results in the maximum speed of 1.4GB/sec. To receive and record this data keeping up with this speed and with no loss, the design of the software running on the data archive system for receving and recording the output data from the correlator is very important. But, the simple kind of programming using just single thread that receives data from network and records it by turns, can cause a bottleneck effect while processing high speed data and a probable data loss, and cannot utilize the merit of hardwares supporting multi core or hyper threading, or operating systems supporting these hardwares. In this presentation we summarize the design of the data transfer software for KJJVC and high speed, large capacity data archive system using general socket programming and multi threading techniques, and the results of testing of purchased storage system using this software.

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Data Reduction Pipeline for EMIR, the GTC Near-IR Multi-Object Spectrograph
Sergio Pascual	Madrid Complutense University, Astrophysics Department
EMIR is a near-infrared wide-field camera and multi-object spectrograph being built for the 10.4m Spanish telescope (Gran Telescopio Canarias, GTC) at La Palma Observatory (Canary islands, Spain). The Data Reduction Pipeline (DRP) will be optimized for handling and reducing near-infrared data acquired with EMIR. Both reduced data and associated error frames will be delivered to the end-users as a final product. The DRP is being designed and built by the EMIR Universidad Complutense de Madrid group.

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Integrated e-infrastructures for astrophysics
Fabio Pasian	INAF
Also in the case of astrophysics, the capability of performing ``Big Science″ requires the availability of large HPC facilities. But computational resources alone are far from being enough for the community: as a matter of fact, the whole set of e-infrastructures (network, computing nodes, data repositories, applications) need to work in an interoperable way. This implies the development of common (or at least compatible) user interfaces to computing resources, transparent access to observations and numerical simulations through the Virtual Observatory, integrated data processing pipelines, data mining and semantic web applications. Achieving this interoperability goal is a must to build a real ``Knowledge Infrastructure″ in the astrophysical domain.

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LOPS - towards a science driven observation preparation tool.
Alexey Pavlov	MPIA
LINC-NIRVANA is the near-infrared homothetic imaging camera for the Large Binocular Telescope. Once operational, it will provide an unprecedented combination of angular resolution, sensitivity and field of view due to the large collecting area of the two LBT mirrors (8.4m) and by means of the Multi-Conjugated Adaptive Optics (MCAO) and a Fringe and Flexure Tracker System (FFTS). The LINC-NIRVANA Observation Preparation Software (LOPS) is a software tool that supports astronomers in constructing a full observing project for the INC-NIRVANA instrument. The process of the preparation of such observing projects are strongly imposed by the scientific goals and the complexity of the LINC-NIRVANA instrument set up. The LOPS helps the observer to prepare and assemble high level science programs using graphical representation of the components. It allows automatic propagation of the elements among these components and provides a mechanism to investigate the parameter space for justification of the scientific objectives. A prepared information will be then later interpreted by the instrument control software into the low level observation control sequences. At the current phase of the development we present a pilot version -- candidate for the LOPS beta version.

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Optimal Compression Methods for Floating-point Format Images
William D. Pence	NASA/GSFC
We report on the results of a comparison study of different techniques for compressing FITS images that have floating-point (real*4) pixel values. Standard file compression methods like GZIP are generally ineffective in this case (with typical compression ratios only in the range 1.2 - 1.6), so instead we use a technique of converting the floating-point values into quantized scaled integers that are compressed using the Rice algorithm. The compressed data stream is stored in FITS format using the tiled-image compression convention. This is technically a lossy compression method, since the pixel values are not exactly reproduced, however all the significant photometric and astrometric information content of the image can be preserved while achieving greatly enhanced compression ratios over those provided by GZIP. We also show that introducing dithering, or randomization, when assigning the quantized pixel values can significantly improve the photometric and astrometric precision in the stellar images in the compressed file without adding additional noise. We quantify our results by comparing the stellar magnitudes and positions as measured in the original uncompressed image to those derived from the same image after applying successively greater amounts of compression. This compression method may be applied to any FITS image by using the FPACK and FUNPACK compression utility programs that are available from the HEASARC web site at http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/fitsio/fpack/.

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Efficiencies of various classification methods applied to XMM-Newton sources
Francois-Xavier Pineau	Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg
The statistical identification of all serendipitous X-ray sources detected by the EPIC camera is one of the tasks devoted to the Survey Science Centre (SSC) of XMM-Newton. Using a probabilistic cross-correlation of the 2XMMi catalogue with others like the SDSS DR7 or the 2MASS, we have built several samples of multiwavelength data for which various thresholds on the number of spurious associations can be applied. We create a learning sample of classified XMM sources from the SDSS spectroscopy and from the Archival Catalogue and Database Subsystem which is the remote part of the SSC pipeline that performs the cross-correlation of EPIC sources against a large collection of archival data including Simbad. This allowed us to apply both supervised or unsupervised classification methods. We tested a range of classification algorithms such as simple k-Nearest Neighbours, Mean Shifts, Kernel Density Classification or Support Vector Machines. Advantages and disavantages of each methods are reviewed, and their respective performances are compared.

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NICMOS Temperature Dependent Calibration
Nor Pirzkal	STScI
We present our latest calibration work of the NICMOS instrument on the Hubble Space Telescope. This new calibration method uses a novel method to determine the temperature of the detector directly from the science exposure. This has allow, as we show here, to better monitor the temperature behavior of the instrument′s three detectors, providing calibration files that account for the temperature sensitivity of the photometry, the flat-fields, and different components of the dark signal, including the shading and the amplifier glow. and has allowed us improve the calibration of this instrument by providing temperature specific calibration files such as flat-fields, darks, and shading. The temperature of the instrument is determined from the bias level of the data, which is determined using the first read of these non-destructive read, multi-accum datasets. It has allowed us to determine the temperature of each of the three NICMOS detectors to within 0.05K and offers a significant improvement over the available mounting cup temperature sensor that has been used in the past.

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Visualization of ASH Simulations of Stellar MHD with SDvision
Daniel Pomarede	CEA/IRFU
With the growing power of high performance computing centers, simulation is playing a leading role in the study of astrophysical objects. The ASH Anelastic Spherical Harmonics program is used to perform high-resolution three-dimensional simulations on massively parallel mainframes with up to several thousands processors, with a special emphasis on the MHD processes occuring in the convection zone of the Sun and other stars. The size and complexity of the data produced in these simulations require to use special software tools at the post-treatment, visualization and analysis stages. The need for interactive and immersive visualization of these data has motivated the development of the SDvision graphical interface. This tool is deployed in the framework of IDL Object Graphics and offers several ways to visualize the scalar and vector fields produced in the simulations. Scalar fields are visualized through either a ray-casting volume rendering, an isosurface reconstruction, a texture mapping algorithm, or through volume slicing. In the volume rendering implementation, the tuning of the RGB colors and transparencies lookup tables can be tuned interactively to enhance the visualization of the turbulent structures that characterize these data. Vector fields are visualized by hedgehog displays or by streamlines that can be seeded interactively. The SDvision tool provides a visualization of the scene though either an OpenGL, hardware-based rendering or through a pure software computation. It is used to produce stereo rendering of the data distribution, with a module producing the input to the new generation of autostereocopic high-definition screens.

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Illusion - A Fabry-Perot Data-Cube Synthesizer.
Bruno Correa Quint	Universidade de Sao Paulo, SP, Brazil
Illusion is a software to synthesize Fabry-Perot data for the BTFI project. BTFI stands for Brazilian Tunable Imager Filter and it is a instrument being developed in the Universidade de Sao Paulo in collaboration with several other institutes in Brazil, Canada and France. This instrument will be installed on the SOAR telescope in Chile. Illusion synthesize data to help in the development of data-reduction routines, to train observers and to simulate observations in different contexts. The synthesized data are obtained considering different kind of sources located in the telescope′s image plane and these data are described essentially by the Airy profile. The results are data-cubes in the FITS format that has been extremely important to develop new data-reduction routines and for the training of the BTFI′s software group.

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Implementation of the global parameters determination in Gaia's Astrometric Solution (AGIS).
Frederic Raison	European Space Astronomy Centre of ESA, Madrid, Spain
Gaia is ESA′s space astrometry mission with a foreseen launch date in early 2012. Its main objective is to perform a stellar census of the 1000 Million brightest objects in our galaxy (completeness to V=20 mag) from which an astrometric catalog of micro-arcsec level accuracy will be constructed. A key element in this endeavor is the Astrometric Global Iterative Solution (AGIS). A core part of AGIS is to determine the accurate spacecraft attitude, geometric instrument calibration and astrometric model parameters for a well-behaved subset of all the objects (the `primary stars′). In addition, a small number of global parameters will be estimated, one of these being PPN γ. We present here the implementation of the algorithms dedicated to the determination of the global parameters.

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Extending the device support for the ALMA Control subsystem code generation framework
Johnny WIlliam Reveco	Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI)
The existing code generation framework in the ALMA Control subsystem provides basic and functional code for ALMA antenna devices using CAN bus as communication interface. There are also devices which use Ethernet communication. The purpose of this work is to extend the code generation framework, based on openArchitectureWare, to include the code generation of Ethernet control components, working on top of the ALMA Common Software (ACS) distributed control framework. In order to achieve this, a new data model and new class templates are needed, and the device components design has to be adapted. With the approach presented in this paper, which was implemented in early 2009 and put into production in late 2009, it was possible to extend a common base for both, Ethernet and CAN devices, code generator data models, and also define a new interface to control Ethernet devices. This new model is expected to be a generic approach, since it would be simple to extend for other device bus types. In general terms, this is a work towards generic device support through code generation.

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A fast asteroid detection algorithm
Tsuyoshi Sakamoto	Japan Spaceguard Association
We present an asteroid detection algorithm that performs fast and automatic processing for a large volume of data produced in wide field surveys. Asteroids have typical daily motions of 15 arcminutes or larger across the sky, and their accurate orbital determinations require us to undertake followup observations as soon as they were detected. In particular, the asteroids passing near the earth′s orbit (Near Earth Asteroids, hereafter NEAs) move a few degrees per day, and the onset of follow observations within a day is essential. Advent of mosaic CCD cameras provides wide field surveys on NEAs over a sky coverage of about one thousand squared degrees per night, such as Catalina Sky Survey and the Panoramic Survey Telescope & Rapid Response System. Thus, it is imperative to construct algorithms that detect faint asteroids with various motions quickly and automatically on the basis of a large volumes of data. Recent works have constructed the algorithms that detect very faint asteroids automatically, such as matched filter method and the method that combines multiple frames along the motion of main-belt asteroids. However, the asteroid detection from a large volumes of data on the basis of their algorithms are too time-consuming. This is because the algorithms depend on only a velocity matching technique that looks for any objects shifting in a linear fashion across the temporal sequence of frames, and the asteroid detection on the basis of the algorithms requires the search over very wide area, in particular the search within a cicle with radius larger than a few arcminutes in all directions is required for the detection of NEAs. The light profiles of the asteroids are good indicators of asteroid search because they are elongated in direction of their motions if the motion during the exposure is larger than the seeing. The light profiles are also distorted by telescope, instrument, other optics, in particular near the edge of the whole image. Thus, we confine the seach area of asteroids by predicting the direction of the motion from the position angle of the ellipse of the light profiles by considering the light profiles of stars enclosed with asteroid candidates. We construct a fast asteroid detection alogorithm that performs both the analyses of the light profile and a velocity matching technique. We check the run-time efficiency and the detection rate of asteroids with various motions and magnitudes by applying our algorithm to the imaging data by 2KCCD mounted on 1-m telescope at kiso observatory, the Mosaic mounted on 0.9-m telescope at WIYN observatory, and other telescopes.

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Data Provenance: Use Cases for the ESO archive, and interactions with the Virtual Observatory
Juande Santander Vela	European Southern Observatory
In the Virtual Observatory era, where we intend to expose scientists, or software agents on their behalf, to a stream of observations from all existing facilities, the ability to access, and to further interpret the origin, relationships, and processing steps on archived astronomical assets (their provenance) is a requirement for proper observation selection, and quality assessment. In this poster we present the different use cases Data Provenance is needed for, the many challenges inherent to the ESO archive and their link with ongoing work in the IVOA.

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Environment Study of AGNs at z = 0.3 to 3.0 using the Japanese Virtual Observatory

Yuji Shirasaki

NAOJ, ADC

We present a science use case of Virtual Observatory, which is actually achieved to examine an environment of AGN upto redshift of 3.0. We used the Japanese Virtual Observatory (JVO) to obtain the Subaru Suprime-Cam images around known AGNs.

It is thought that the origin of AGN activity is accretion of matters into a massive black hole at the center of the galaxy. One possible mechanism for causing the rapid inflows of the gas into the central region is a major merger between gas-rich galaxies. If this is the case, AGNs are expected to be found in an environment of higher galaxy density than an environment of typical galaxies. Thus the AGN produced at higher redshifts should be observed in a high galaxy density environment.

The current observations, however, indicates that AGNs do not reside in a particularly high density environment. We must, however, be cautious with the results obtained especially at high redshift (z > 0.6). All the high redshift experiments are based on the galaxies selected by a color cut, so some kinds of galaxies are missed in the samples. The observations are limited to several specific fields, so the results are strongly affected by cosmic variance.

We investigated ~1000 AGNs, which are distributed in wide area of the sky, without applying any color selection. The number of AGN examined is about ten times larger than the other studies covering the redshifts larger than 0.6. We successfully found significant excess of galaxies around AGNs at redshifts of 0.3 to 1.8.

If this work is done in a classical manner, that is, raw data are retrieved from the archive through a web interface in an interactive way and the data are reduced in a local poor machine, it may take several years to finish it. Thus we have developed parallel computing system which can communicates with the Subaru data archive in bandwidth of 32 Gbps at maximum. All the public Suprime-Cam data were reduced with this system and the data are provided through the JVO system. So it is possible to do an environment study for any types of object using the deeps image obtained by the Suprime-Cam with very few effort.

We have constructed a pipeline for calculating the galaxy number density profile around a given coordinate. The analysis procedure performed in the pipeline is: searching Suprime-Cam images and UKIDSS catalog data for a given AGN field, retrieve the data from the archive, analyze them on the local machine, and create a radial distribution of number of galaxies and effective area around the specified coordinate. This procedure was executed in parallel on ~10 quad core PCs, and it took only one day for obtaining the final result. Our result implies that the Japanese Virtual Observatory can be a powerful tool to investigate the large scale structure of the intermediate redshift Universe.

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Real-Time Discovery and Classification of Sparsely Sampled Science Using Berkeley's Transient Classification Pipeline
Dan Starr	UC Berkeley, Department of Astronomy
The Berkeley Transients Classiﬁcation Pipeline is a parallelized source identiﬁcation, classiﬁcation, and broadcast pipeline which currently identifies transient and variable science observed by the Palomar Transient Factory′s all sky survey. We will discuss successful science classifiers and light-curve characterizing algorithms which are currently applied to the PTF survey, as well as solutions to challenges which arise when filtering out spurious detections from a 100 Megapixel, 7.8 degree field subtraction pipeline. One such solution is a 2D-image classifier which we′ve trained to exclude poorly subtracted sources using input that has been ″crowd sourced″ from a dozen users using our GroupThink web application. The TCP′s science classifications are made using a weighted combination of machine learning algorithms which have been trained using data from DotAstro.org′s light-curve warehouse.

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Parallel CLEAN: beyond the frequency domain.
Ian M. Stewart	University of Cape Town, Department of Astronomy.
The CLEAN algorithm, despite its problematic convergence properties and its need for heuristic intervention and tuning, is the most commonly used means of attenuating sampling artifacts from images made through radio interferometry. A subsequent modification (Sault and Wieringa 1994) adapted CLEAN to observations made using a wide fractional bandwidth, which are not well handled by the original algorithm. Here a generalized version of the Sault-Wieringa algorithm is applied to other cases where standard CLEAN also fails, including time-variable and off-pixel-centre sources. A 1-dimensional version of the latter technique can also be applied to extract non-integer frequency values from periodograms.

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User Support in the Virtual Astronomical Observatory
Elizabeth B Stobie	National Optical Astronomy Observatory
As the U.S. Virtual Astronomical Observatory (VAO) enters its operational phase, support for its growing number of users will become ever more important. The VAO User Support group has responsibility in three key areas: (1) for maintaining and expanding the VAO Help Desk and Web Site, which will give access to all the catalogs, services, and tools that the VAO provides; (2) for conducting aggressive Testing and Readiness Reviews, so that those tools and services will work reliably and will be well documented; and (3) for pursuing diverse opportunities for Training and Advocacy, including tutorials, seminars, and support for advanced use of the VAO. We will present our implementation plans with the expectation of receiving feedback from the community in order to develop a more effective User Support system for the VAO.

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Single dish observation simulator in CASA
Kanako Sugimoto	National Astronomical Observatory of Japan
Simulated observational data for the complex astronomical instruments such as ALMA provides users what properties, sensitivities, and dynamical ranges are possible with the observation, and helps them decide planning observations. In addition, it enables us to test data reduction procedures and their reliability by comparing reduced simulation data with the input model. In order to implement capability of simulating single dish observation in CASA (Common Astronomical Software Applications), a task for single dish observation simulation (SD simulator) is now on the way of development and the first prototype task will be available in the next release scheduled at the end of 2009. CASA SD simulator task predicts observational data and image from an input model image which represents the sky to be observed. The task functionality is realized by binding up functions in C++ libraries (tools) with a Python script (see the abstract by Nakazato et al. for the details of CASA architecture). Taking advantages of the simulation, single dish data reduction and imager tools, users can simulate observations with specified settings, e.g., a telescope, date, integration time, spatial gridding, etc. CASA SD simulator is so far able to simulate data from pointing observations and is planned to implement all observational modes of ALMA (ACA) total power antennas, in future, which include On-The-Fly observation in combination with either position-switching or frequency-switching. It is also planned to enable addition of various errors to corrupt the simulated data such as thermal noises, pointing errors, band characteristics, atmospheric emission and absorption, etc. SD / total power simulation will also be integrated at the python level with existing synthesis simulation in CASA (the simdata task). When completed, users will be able to seamlessly simulate a dataset containing 12m ALMA visibilities, 7m ACA visibilities, and total power, using a single sky model and corrupted with consistent atmospheric and instrumental effects. We will report the current status of development, future plans and perspectives of single dish observation simulator in CASA.

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Doppler Shift Correction for 2SB Receivers of the 45m Telescope at the Nobeyama Radio Observatory
Shigeru Takahashi	Nobeyama Radio Observatory, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan
Since the radial velocity between an object and an observer varies with time due to the rotation and revolution of the earth, spectral line observations using a radio telescope need Doppler shift corrections for the data obtained. Converting observed frequencies into rest frequencies allows us to compare the observed spectra with those measured in the laboratory and to identify molecules in existence in observed objects. There are several methods in the Doppler correction, and we choose a proper method which is suitable for each receiver and observational technique. To date, when observations are performed using a position switching method, receivers (HEMT22, SIS80/100, BEARS etc.) of the 45m telescope at Nobeyama Radio Observatory (NRO) adopt a local frequency (Lof) correction method; namely, the correction is done by changing the Lof (synthesizer frequency) every integration. Since the 2008 season, two new units of a two sideband-separating (2SB) receiver (T100H/T100V) have been installed for public use. These new receivers can simultaneously observe in both sidebands so that the conventional correction method used in NRO is not suitable for these receivers, because the correction can be applied for only one sideband, and the correction of the other sideband is not accurate. In order to solve this problem, we have developed a new Doppler shift correction method for the 2SB receivers. The new method is that Lof is set as the value of the first integration and fixed throughout an observation, and all the corrections changing with time are done by software. In this poster, we present this software Doppler shift correction method for the 2SB receivers, showing a comparison with the conventional Lof correction method.

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Development of AKARI reduction tools for IRC slow-scan
Satoshi Takita	ISAS/JAXA
The first Japanese infrared astronomical satellite AKARI have made observations with two instruments; the Infrared Camera (IRC; 1.7--26.5 micron) and the Far-Infrared Surveyor (FIS; 50--180 micron). AKARI carried out an all-sky survey at six wavelength bands (9, 18, 65, 90, 140, 160 micron) during May 2006 to August 2007. In addition thousands of pointed observations of selected target have been performed. In the pointed observation mode the IRC has three choices of observation modes; imaging, spectroscopy and slow-scan observations. The FIS has two modes; slow-scan and spectroscopy. In the slow-scan observation mode data acquisition runs continuously while the telescope scans the sky with much slower speed (8, 15 or 30 arcsec/sec) than that of the All-Sky Survey (215 arcsec/sec). We present the details of data reduction software for the IRC slow-scan observations. The data are prepared in dedicated format called TSD (Time-Series Data), which was originally designed for the FIS. The format makes it available to provide all necessary information at each data acquisition in a raw of a table in a FITS file. Basic data processing such as flat-fielding are applied onto this TSD format data. The highlight of the data processing is the ′self pointing reconstruction′. The scan position information provided from the satellite telemetry is not accurate enough compared to the required accuracy for the IRC observations. Therefore, we developed a software to make time dependent correction based on the observed sources by comparing the position reference catalogue. With the system we realized the position accuracy of the reduced images / point source information. as good as one arcsec. The details of the algorithm and software system will be described.

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Data Archive and Transmission System (DARTS) of ISAS/JAXA
Takayuki Tamura	ISAS/JAXA
Data ARchives and Transmission System (DARTS) is a versatile space science data archive for astrophysics, solar physics, solar-terrestrial physics, and lunar and planetary science. In astrophysics part we have archived and released the data from ASCA, Suzaku (X-ray astronomy), IRTS, AK\ ARI (Infrared astronomy), and other missions. Recent new services include SUZAKU and AKARI query pages, JUDO (sky-navigation), UDON (QL analysis of X-r ay data) and public education pages. Our current and future data archive services will be introduced.

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Impact of Gfarm, a Wide-area Distributed File System, upon Astronomical Data Analysis and Virtual Observatory.
Masahiro Tanaka	University of Tsukuba, Center for Computational Sciences
While 100 TB-scale astronomical data are available through Virtual Observatories, there are still several issues for large-scale data analysis that include transferring a large amount of data and securing enough capacity of storage. We thus propose a VO-capable file system in order to offer easy access to astronomical data, by utilizing Gfarm, a wide-area distributed file system developed as an e-Science infrastructure. Gfarm is a distributed file system that federates storage systems in wide area. It is designed to achieve high reliability and high performance exploiting file replicas and distributed file access. These features facilitate large-scale astronomical data analysis under research collaboration of multiple distant organizations. We discuss file system structure and search method which are compliant with VO standards and the initial performance of data analysis on this system.

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Building the Spitzer Source List
Harry Isaac Teplitz	IRSA
The Spitzer Science Center will produce a source list (SL) of photometry for a large subset of imaging data in the Spitzer Heritage Archive (SHA). The list will enable a large range of science projects. The primary requirement on the SL is very high reliability, with areal coverage, completeness and limiting depth being secondary considerations. The SHA at the NASA Infrared Science Archive (IRSA) will serve the SL as an enhanced data product. The SL will include data from the four channels of IRAC (3-8 microns) and the 24 micron channel of MIPS. The Source List will include image products (mosaics) and photometric data for Spitzer observations of about 1500 square degrees and include around 30 million sources. We describe the plans and timeline for development of the Spitzer Source List. We demonstrate the verification of the Source List pipeline using Spitzer Legacy catalogs at ″truth tables″. Finally, we discuss the range of use cases which will be supported.

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Adding support to ACS for Real-Time operations through the usage of a POSIX-compliant RTOS
Rodrigo Javier Tobar	Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria
The ALMA project consists in a group of about 60 antennas working synchronized to make observations of celestial bodies. The distributed control of this project will be done using the ALMA Common Software (ACS). Nevertheless, this framework lacks of the real time capabilities to control the antennas′ instrumentation --- as has been probed by previous works --- and which has lead to non-portable workarounds to the problem. Indeed, the time service used in ACS, which is based in the Container/Component model, presents plenty of results that confirms the lack of support for real-time operations on ACS. This paper address the problem of designing and integrate a real-time service for ACS, providing to the framework an implementation such that the control operations over the different instruments could be done within real-time constraints. This implementation is measured with the same metrics that the current time service, showing the difference between the two systems when subjecting them to common scenarios. Also, the new implementation is done following the POSIX specification, ensuring interoperability and portability through time and different operating systems.

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A Boosting approach for the detection of faint compact sources in wide field aperture synthesis radio images
University of Girona	Albert Torrent
Several thresholding techniques have been proposed so far in order to perform faint compact source detection in wide field interferometric radio images. Due to their low intensity/noise ratio, some objects can be easily missed by these automatic detection methods. In this paper we present a novel approach to overcome this problem. Our proposal is based on using local features extracted from a bank of filters. These features provide a description of different types of faint source structures. Our approach performs an initial training step in order to automatically learn and select the most salient features, which are then used in a Boosting classifier to perform the detection. The validity of our method is demonstrated using 19 images that compose a 2.5 deg x 2.5 deg radio mosaic, obtained with the Giant Metrewave Radio Telescope, centered on the MGRO J2019+37 peak of gamma emission at the Cygnus region. A comparison with two previously published radio catalogues of this region (task SAD of AIPS and SExtractor) is also provided.

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Concept of VSOP-2 Science Operation Center (SOC: tentative)
Tomofumi Umemoto	National Astronomical Observatory of Japan
NAOJ along with ISAS/JAXA plans the construction of the science operation center (SOC) (tentative name) which role is the scheduling of space and ground telescopes, the management of science data to provide for and the assistance for the user in the world. SOC is indispensable presence for succeed in the VSOP-2 project, a point of contact with the researcher who uses the VSOP-2, and it plays an important role so that the researcher may raise the maximum scientific output. For this, the functions of SOC for the organization of ground telescopes and the scheduling of observations, the management and support of processing the correlation, an automatic calibration and analysis of the data with the pipeline processing, an archive of huge data and making the database, the detailed assistance of the data analysis for the visiting user, and the education and the public outreach, are required. In this poster, we introduce the computing system and software development for the VSOP-2 data analysis.

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Flexible Scientific Processing within the WSO-UV observatory
Rafael Vazquez-Osorio	GMV, Aerospace and Defence, S.A.
Flexible Scientific Processing within the WSO-UV observatory R. Vazquez, C. Munoz, J.C. Vallejo, J.M. Lozano, (GMV AD), A.I. Gomez de Castro, (UCM) The World Space Observatory/Ultraviolet - WSO/UV is a major international collaboration involving researchers from several countries with Russia playing the leading role, through Russian Federal Agency, ROSCOSMOS. It aims to study the Universe in the 100 - 320 nm ultraviolet wavelengths range with a space observatory based in a primary mirror of diameter 170cm. Its expected lifetime may expand during nearly 10 yrs, with a launch date set in 2012. Aiming to maximize the scientific return along such a long lifetime, the ground segment architecture is to be based in a modular approach, relying in a common framework able to run together different subsystems developed from different agencies and institutes, which may be fully upgraded and even replaced along the years. Another key point for successful operations is to adopt a very flexible approach for the scientific processing of data within the WSO/UV Ground Segment. In the framework of current design and development activities within the project, we are working on the design and prototyping of the Scientific Data Processing Centre (SDPC) that will be in charge of processing (and reprocessing) Observation Data Set (ODS) providing the end users with the mission final science products, ready for scientific utilisation. From a design point of view, the goal is to achieve a fully modular and configurable SDPC system. The processing is driven according configuration files, covering all the processing steps from the highest one, the observation, to the lowest one, the atomic step, where a single algorithm is applied to a set of data inputs. Algorithms can be provided and used as integrated functionalities in form of callable functions (e.g java/C class) or as any runnable module including also interpreted languages (e.g python, IDL, SHELLs). In the future, this SDPC framework will support not only reduction processing steps but also high-level processing steps, which will provide extended product via cross-check with internal and external catalogue or quality assessment.

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Flexible Scientific Processing within the WSO-UV observatory
Rafael Vazquez-Osorio	GMV, Aerospace and Defence, S.A.
Flexible Scientific Processing within the WSO-UV observatory R. Vazquez, C. Munoz, J.C. Vallejo, J.M. Lozano, (GMV AD), A.I. Gomez de Castro, (UCM) The World Space Observatory/Ultraviolet - WSO/UV is a major international collaboration involving researchers from several countries with Russia playing the leading role, through Russian Federal Agency, ROSCOSMOS. It aims to study the Universe in the 100 - 320 nm ultraviolet wavelengths range with a space observatory based in a primary mirror of diameter 170cm. Its expected lifetime may expand during nearly 10 yrs, with a launch date set in 2012. Aiming to maximize the scientific return along such a long lifetime, the ground segment architecture is to be based in a modular approach, relying in a common framework able to run together different subsystems developed from different agencies and institutes, which may be fully upgraded and even replaced along the years. Another key point for successful operations is to adopt a very flexible approach for the scientific processing of data within the WSO/UV Ground Segment. In the framework of current design and development activities within the project, we are working on the design and prototyping of the Scientific Data Processing Centre (SDPC) that will be in charge of processing (and reprocessing) Observation Data Set (ODS) providing the end users with the mission final science products, ready for scientific utilisation. From a design point of view, the goal is to achieve a fully modular and configurable SDPC system. The processing is driven according configuration files, covering all the processing steps from the highest one, the observation, to the lowest one, the atomic step, where a single algorithm is applied to a set of data inputs. Algorithms can be provided and used as integrated functionalities in form of callable functions (e.g java/C class) or as any runnable module including also interpreted languages (e.g python, IDL, SHELLs). In the future, this SDPC framework will support not only reduction processing steps but also high-level processing steps, which will provide extended product via cross-check with internal and external catalogue or quality assessment.

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6D visualization of multidimensional data by means of cognitive technology
Vladimir V. Vitkovskiy	Special Astrophysical Observatory of RAS, Informatics Department
The multidimensional data huge volume analysis problems can be resolved with the help of modern information technologies and, first of all, with the help of the cognitive computer graphics. New methodology must ensure the successful application of software of the visualization of multidimensional data and systems of the visual programming. New procedures and means of work with the cognitive graphic figures give impetus to the development of fundamentally new algorithmic, software of the visualization of experimental data. The development of cognitive machine drawing for the generation of the visual means of the content of the contemporary bases of given, system archives and the data banks is possible. On the basis of the cognitive graphics concept, we worked out the Space Walker system for visualization and analysis. The system dynamically generates three-dimensional projections of the multidimensional data in the form of mobile three-dimensional images on the computer screen. It allows to train and to aggravate intuition of researcher, to raise his interest and motivation to the creative, scientific cognition, to realize process of dialogue with the very problems simultaneously. The Space Hedgehog system is the next step in the cognitive means of the multidimensional data analyze. The technique and technology cognitive 6D visualization of the multidimensional data is developed on the basis of the cognitive visualization research and technology development. The Space Hedgehog system allows direct dynamic visualization of 6D objects. It is developed with use of experience of the program Space Walker creation and its applications. Let us emphasize that in the form of cognitive means the content of terabyte multidimensional massifs can be represented and analyzed.

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Data mining in the SIMBAD database log files
Marc Wenger	Strasbourg Observatory, C.D.S.
The SIMBAD database software logs information from every query, both from the web server and from the SIMBAD software itself. In the last years, the number of queries increased from 30,000 to 300,000 queries per day. This gives a good basis to make some study among this information. Several kind of results will be presented: the way people are working: from session duration to preferred working hours by country. Combining the query IP addresses with an IP geolocalisation database allows to highlight the most active places in astronomy in the world, and also some more surprising ones. Analyzing the type of objects and the sky area queried shows some trends in the astronomers interests. Finally, the SIMBAD log files allow sometimes to visualize particular events.

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The ALMA Front-end Archive Setup and Performance
Andreas Wicenec	European Southern Observatory
The ALMA front-end archive system has to capture up to 64 MB/s for a period of several days plus the data of about 100,000 monitor points from all 66 antennas and the correlators. The main science data is delivered through corba based audio/video streams and finally stored on SATA disk arrays hosted on 6 computers and controlled by 12 daemons. All data is collected by software components running on computers in the antennas and then sent through dedicated fiber links to the Array Operations Site at 5000m and from there to the Operations Support Facility (OSF) at 3000m elevation. The various hardware and software components have been tuned and tested to be able to meet the performance requirements. This paper describes the setup and the various components in more detail and gives results of various test runs.

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STARS 2 - 2nd generation open-source archiving and query software for the Subaru Telescope
Tom Winegar	Subaru Telescope
The Subaru Telescope is in process of replacing the 1st generation software - STARS 1 - designed for archiving and query of all FITS files and telescope status logs produced by the telescope. STARS 1 has been operational for almost 10 years, and currently manages approximately 3.5 million frames and 100,000 status logs, totalling ~30 TB of combined data. STARS 1 is designed and supported under yearly contract with a vendor, using Oracle databases and C and Perl programming languages. STARS 1, located in Hilo, is matched with a sister archive located in Japan - MASTARS - serving the Japanese astronomy community from Mitaka, Japan. In the interest of reducing operating expenses and transitioning to in-house support, STARS 2 began development in 2006 to duplicate the functionality of STARS 1 with open-source databases and modern programming languages. After 3 years of development, STARS 2 is currently in beta-testing with Subaru staff, in preparation for release to observers later this year. Using MySQL databases and Python and PHP, STARS 2 intends to run in parallel operation with STARS 1 for several years, eventually replacing STARS 1. Since the actual FITS files and telescope status logs are stored in native format in a ~100 TB archive, both STARS 1 and 2 databases contain only FITS keyword=values, administrative information, and current archive file locations. In this way, STARS 1 and STARS 2 may operate in parallel for query functions, simultaneously accessing the same archive. STARS Registration functions will be transitioned to STARS 2 when required. STARS 1 utilized HTTP/HTTPS as the transfer mechanism for delivery of files to offsite observers. STARS 2 continues using HTTP/HTTPS as the preferred transfer mechanism, and adds FTP-outgoing and SCP-outgoing as additional protocols for offsite transfer. In addition, STARS 2 benefits from our experience with the limitations of STARS 1, and has additional features requested by users. Some of the additional features in STARS 2 are: Stored Queries - User queries and results listings are stored and file-by-file transfer-status information is detailed. Stored Destinations - FTP and SCP login parameters are stored by user. Scheduled Transfers - Users can schedule a future time for automatic transfer of files. Calibration Sets - Calibration frames may be assigned to Calibration Sets, which can then be assigned to more than one ProposalID. Improved System Administration - All user activity is logged and the current status of user queries and transfers is easily monitored.

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BibCat: The Chandra Data Archive Bibliography Cataloging System
Sherry L Winkelman	Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
The Chandra Data Archive (CDA) has been tracking publications in refereed journals and on-line conference proceedings that are based on Chandra observations since early in the mission. Over the years this database and its associated tools have expanded dramatically. In this paper we describe our newly renovated bibliography architecture with an emphasis on new features which have been added including: auto-scan capabilities to reduce in an automated fashion the number of papers which need to be manually classified and to flag keywords (such as observatory names or surveys) used within papers; multi-user classification allowing quality assurance checks; multi-observatory capabilities allowing multiple facilities to use the same database independently; and plug-in support allowing access to associated observatory data to more fully describe data links in papers. The usefulness of some of these features speak for themselves, but others are not so obvious. As an example, we intend to use the multi-observatory functionality to apply separate classification schemes to papers relating to the CDA and the Chandra Source Catalog and potentially to other observatories at the Center for Astrophysics. The data mining aspects of the auto-scanning capabilities can be used for many purposes such as: improving searching for Chandra related papers from both ADS and our bibliography search pages or linking papers to grants for internal uses.

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An algorithm of refinement of image alignment for image subtraction
Masafumi YAGI	National Astronomical Observatory of Japan
I will present an algorithm for estimating a shift between a pair of almost aligned images. Thought rough estimation of flux scale and position alignment is available from catalog matching technique,a small shift can make many positive-negative (bipolar) pattern around objects in the difference image of the two. The idea of this study is to use the pattern to find the best position. Moving one image around, we can draw many vectors toward the best position, and the intersection of the vectors would be the solution. The future application for the rotation refinement will also be discussed.

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SFITSIO -- A next-generation FITS I/O library for C/C++ users
Chisato Yamauchi	Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Center of Science-satellite Operation and Data Archive
The SFITSIO is newly developed FITS I/O library to minimize user effort. This next-generation library supports writing C-language code, and users can intuitively write their code for FITS I/O. The APIs represent the structure of FITS, therefore, users do not forget usage of APIs. By using SFITSIO, users can escape the nuisance that they frequently read the manual document when writing their code using current FITS libraries. The SFITSIO supports r/w of Image, Ascii Table and Binary Table, and some CFITSIO extensions. Access to the compressed files via network is also supported. We will prepare a tutorial document of this library, and distribute it at our poster booth.

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A Simple Implementation of a 3D Data Cube viewer
Honglin Ye	National Radio Astronomy Observatory
One of the most important end product from a spectral line observation is the brightness B as a function of right ascension RA, declination DEC and frequency F. B(RA, DEC, F) is commonly referred to as data cube or image cube. In practice, brightness is obtained, for each frequency channel separately, as images. While rendering a stack of such images in various ways can illuminate some of the important aspects of the data cube, the process of finding relations between channels can be difficult and time consuming. New instrument, such as ALMA and EVLA, that can observe over a broad wave length range and up to thousands channels, will present enormous challenges for the visualization and analysis of large number of paged images. It is often desirable to render the data cube as a whole, to examine from arbitrary viewing angle and for any clip region of interest. To meet some of these needs in CASA, I developed a GUI based on Qt OpenGL module for for viewing tree-dimensional data. I will describe the design and implementation of this tool and demonstrate its use.

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Experiences Virtualizing ALMA Software
Mauricio Alejandro Zambrano	Associated Universities, Inc.
One of the new topics in system administration during the last years has been the virtualization with all the benefits it implies. Hardware and operative systems are now offering new features to improve the performance of such environments to nearly match real hardware performance. ALMA software is tested among others in simulation on a controlled Standard Tests Environment (STE). A STE is formed by a set of computers and network hardware composed by a general network services server, a general ALMA service server, a support server, an archive server, real time computers, a switch and firewall. We took an Open source hypervisor and made a set of tools to build, manage and deploy complete sets of STEs to test the ALMA Common Software. For many years ALMA has provided pre-installed virtual machines(VMs) for developers. We took this approach one step further allowing to run ALMA Software in simulation on a fully virtualized STE on a single server. The work we present here will show the goals, scope and policies for virtualization and the benefits of its usage since its adoption in late 2008.

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NICI Python Data Reduction
Nelson R Zarate	Gemini Observatory
NICI, the new adaptive-optics supported Near Infrared Coronagraphic Imager of the Gemini Observatory (South), has recently been commissioned and offered to the astronomical community. The reduction software package has been written in Python using numerical routines from Numpy, Scipy and Ndimage, as well as the Gemini module Astrodata hiding the low level details of NICI FITS files structure. This is a preliminary release for early public NICI users. We discuss the design of the different python modules, the science data preparation, and basic reduction steps as well as the implementation of the Angular and Spectral Differential Imaging (ADI/SDI) reduction algorithm, and the LOCI method (Locally Optimized Combination of Images) producing the final set of reduced science FITS files for high-contrast imaging applications.

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Grown up with the VO /The VO-powered PhD thesis/
Ivan Zolotukhin	Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow State University
The Virtual Observatory has reached sufficient maturity for its routine scientific exploitation by astronomers. To prove this statement, here we present a complete VO-powered PhD thesis comprising 4 science cases covering several aspects of Galactic and extragalactic research. These includes: (1) homogeneous search and measurement of main physical parameters of Galactic open star clusters in huge multi-band photometric surveys; (2) interpretation of UV-to-NIR colours of nearby galaxies using a large homogeneous dataset including spectroscopy and photometry from SDSS, UKIDSS, and GALEX; (3) study of faint low-mass x-ray binaries population in modern observational archives, imposing physical constraints on this poorly-studied type of objects; (4) search for optical counterparts of unidentified x-ray objects with large positional uncertainties in the Galactic Plane. All these studies make heavy use of VO technologies and tools and would not be achievable without them. So refereed papers published in the frame of this thesis can undoubtedly be added to the growing list of VO-based research works.

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BoF Sessions

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:45:02 +0900

2009/10/5

Astronomical Data Compression: Algorithms & Architectures
PDF

Rob Seaman

National Optical Astronomy Observatory

"Only entropy comes easy." - Anton Chekhov

Digital data is the lifeblood of astronomy. Data compression deals with its efficient representation and transport. As focal planes become more crowded and observing cadences more rapid, ever increasing pressure will be applied to realize near-optimum performance. A typical observational workflow comprises many network links and storage nodes, multiplying the advantage of compression dramatically.

Recent work on astronomical data compression has focused on the FITS tile compression convention (http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/fitsio/fpack). We seek a broader discussion of compression-aware astronomical data handling architectures, including compression techniques and algorithms appropriate to binary and ASCII catalogs as well as to imaging data.

The organizers welcome contributions to the BoF's agenda.

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2009/10/7

FITS BoF
William D. Pence	NASA/GSFC
This Birds-of-a-Feather session will present a summary of current activities related to the FITS data format and will provide a forum for the discussion of current issues. Topics of discussion will include 1) Recent changes in membership on the IAU FITS Working Group. (Pence) 2) New conventions that have been submitted to the Registry of FITS Conventions in the past year. (Pence) 3) Summary of advances in FITS image compression techniques. (More detailed discussions will take place in the separate BoF session on data compression). (Seaman) 4) The new draft of the WCS Paper V on Time Coordinate Systems. (Rots) 5) Open forum on any other FITS-related topics.

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Focus Demos

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 18:44:46 +0900

2009/10/5

JUDO and UDON --- JAXA's web-tools for browsing and quick-analysis of space astronomical data
Ken Ebisawa	JAXA/ISAS
JUDO (JAXA Universe Data Oriented) and UDON (Universe via DARTS ON-line) are parts of DARTS (DATA Archives and Transmission System; http://darts.isas.jaxa.jp), which is JAXA′s space science data archives. Using JUDO, you can navigate or rotate the entire sky with simple mouse interface to search for your favorite targets, regions or observations. Currently, we have Suzaku, ASCA, ROSAT (X-rays) and IRAS (infrared) data available on JUDO. From JUDO, external database such as SIMBAD, NED, ADS and SDSS are hyper-linked so that you can find external-references for the targets you are browsing on JUDO. Using UDON, you can display pseudo-color images of X-ray data (currently, Suzaku data is available) with arbitrary color-coding. You may select the region of interests, and extract light-curves and spectra from the region you specified. JUDO and UDON are dynamically linked within DARTS, in particular with Suzaku database, so that Suzaku archive users can easily find the desirable data, look into related external databases, and carry out simple data analysis.

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2009/10/6

Nature Museum Hokkaido The project based on digital cameras which shoot starry sky with hi-resolution images and also remote controllable from the Internet
ken sakuma	Hokkaido Telecommunication Network Co.,Inc.
We have established a promotion web site called Nature Museum Hokkaido (NMH) to promote starry sky which is a new attractive content of Hokkaido. It also accumulates and promotes other attractive contents and information from Hokkaido. The NMH will enable contents holder to distribute their contents easily. The project is founded from Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC), and undertaken by private companies. It is a demonstration experiment of service model which accelerate local information transmission capability. Also, accumulated contents will be distributed to the whole of country. The system The NMH is made up with distributed digital cameras (up to 8) connected to. Those cameras shoot starry sky with hi-resolution images and also remote controllable from the Internet. Images from the cameras are transferred to the database system. At the database those images are archived with additional information such as location, date, time and weather to make the database more useful. Purpose of the NMH Archived images and other information are distributed to the public via NMH web site. It will be used for tourist information, academic use, and astronomical outreach activities.

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ORAL

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 15:57:15 +0900

ESA New Generation Archives: Application of state of the art re-engineering to SOHO Science Archive and EXOSAT Science Archive
Pedro Osuna	European Space Agency
The Science Archives and VO Team (SAT), part of the Science Operations Department of the European Space Agency, started building Astronomical Data Archives back in 1996. IT standards, tools, languages, etc. have had an evolution which could hardly be foreseen at the time. After more than ten years of the first public version of the Infrared Space Observatory (ISO) Archive, the SAT has undertaken the effort to build a state of the art ″Archives Building System Infrastructure″ that provides the building blocks for creation of ESA Space Based Missions archives with renewed technologies and standards. As a demonstration of the goodness of the approach, two Science Archives, coming from two very different research fields, have been created from scratch using the new technology: the SOHO Science Archive and the EXOSAT Science Archive, both made public to the community last April. In this talk, the overall ″Archives Building System Infrastructure″ concept will be shown, and summary of its applicatioin to the building of the ESA New Generation Archives SSA and EXSA will be presented.

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20 Years of Software Reuse and Data Curation in the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database
Rick Ebert	California Institute of Technology, NED
The NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED) is approaching its twentieth anniversary of service to the astronomy community and the public. NED is currently the largest online compilation of information on extragalactic objects. NED is a key participant in the United States Virtual Astronomical Observatory (VAO) and an integrated information provider to GoogleEarth (″sky mode″), the Microsoft Research World-Wide Telescope, and numerous U.S. and international space- and ground-based observatories and research projects. Information from catalogs, archives, images, spectra, and the scientific literature are distilled and associated by the NED Team and a global community of astronomers into a uniform knowledge-base of over 163 million celestial objects. We present a short retrospective on NEDs 20-year evolution; a quick tour of the information holdings; the technologies and software currently used to support the service; and a glimpse of the future of NED. NED is a service of the California Institute of Technology/Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, provided to the scientific community and the public under contract to the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

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Spitzer Heritage Archive
Xiuqin Wu	IRSA/SSC, Caltech,
[This is the abstract for the invited talk: Spitzer Heritage Archive] The Spitzer Heritage Archive will host all the raw and final reprocessed science and calibration data products from the observations made by Spitzer Space Telescope, which is the fourth and final element in NASA′s family of Great Observatories. Spitzer was launched in August 2003. It observed in the 3.6 to 160 micron range with three instruments: IRAC, IRS, and MIPS for five and half years. The cryogen was depleted in May 2009 and it is now in its extended warm mission, observing in 3.6 and 4.5 microns using IRAC. The Spitzer observations have produced vast amount of imaging and spectroscopy data. The heritage archive will make this treasure trove available for astronomy community. The requirements and expectations from our users led us looking into the new technologies in the web interface development. We believe that a good user interface will enhance the user experience to explore the Spitzer data, thus increase the potential of science discovery. We decided on using Google Web Toolkit to deliver an AJAX based web interface, which is powerful and easy-to-use. It will give users the tools to search the database, explore their search results interactively. The meta data will be presented in an easy to read table format. Users can page through their data results, perform sorting, filtering on any column. They can also view the FITS images and spectrum plots before they decide to download them. We also try to reuse the existing software and services, pay close attention to the re-usability of the newly developed system, make it easy to expand, to adopt new technology in the future. This talk will discuss our design principles, system architecture, reuse of the existing software, and reusable components of the system.

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Archive Web sites using AJAX & GWT
Trey Roby	Caltech / IPAC
[Note to administator - This abstract is for an invited talk. Under the catagory: ″Archive applications using visualization: focusing on UIs ALONE″ I accepted the invitation but I have not seen any other way to submit the abstract] -------------------- Begin Abstract ----------------------------------- The last three years have seen much change in web technology and have created some significant breakthroughs. We are now able to let the user interact with an archive from the Web browser in ways we have never thought possible. The Web browser is no longer a glorified batch processing terminal, but an interactive environment that allows the user to have a similar experience as one might expect with an installed desktop application. We can now provide web based FITs viewing and interaction without any plugins. Much of this is made possible using AJAX. AJAX technology has made an major impact on how we think about developing on the Web. Users expect more and are drawn to more interactive and intuitive web sites. The problem with the Javascript part of AJAX is that it does not scale well to large Web applications, is hard to debug, and a lot of browser specific code is required. Google Web Toolkit (GWT) provides the solution to this problem. With GWT, you write code in Java that is compiled into Javascript. GWT handles many of the browser-specific issues and provides you an environment to develop very powerful web sites. This talk will discuss the concepts behind AJAX and GWT. We will also show how using these technologies in an archive web site will create a truly interactive experience.

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The Science Data Model for ALMA and EVLA: The Triumphs and Pitfalls of Software Sharing and Reuse
Nuria P. F. Lorente	NRAO
Software sharing and reuse are generally hailed as good practice, both at the programming level and as a high-level design consideration. In practice, however, the amount of software reuse within the astronomical community falls below potential levels. Two reasons commonly cited as barriers to software sharing are: first, the small size of the astronomical community means that projects with similar software needs do not overlap in time. Second, are the difficulties faced in obtaining political support for software reuse endeavours, which entail an extra cost to the institution for potential long-term benefits to the wider community. The ALMA and EVLA telescope projects, due to their unique positions of overlap - both temporal and in institutional involvement - have avoided these obstacles and have taken the opportunity to develop a common Science Data Model. This paper will present the work done by the ALMA and EVLA software teams towards creating and using a common Science Data Model, and will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of code sharing and reuse, as experienced by these two telescope projects.

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Status of ALMA Software
Brian Glendenning	NRAO
The authors are responsible for the software for the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA), currently under construction at a high site (5000m) in northern Chile. The software is being developed by a large team of more than 70 people on 4 continents, and has been under development for about 10 years. The project has entered its commissioning phase, and the first call for proposals for early science observations will occur in late 2010. In this paper we will outline the current status of the ALMA software. We include both the technical state of development as well as the process and management approaches used.

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Current Status of Single-Dish Data Analysis Software for ALMA
Takeshi Nakazato	National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, ALMA Project Office
We will summarize a current status and a future development plan of the single-dish analysis capability of CASA (Common Astronomical Software Applications). The CASA is a data analysis package for the next generation radio astronomical telescopes such as ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/sub-millimeter Array). Since ALMA is a heterogeneous radio telescope array that consists of an extended interferometric array with fifty 12-m antennas, a compact interferometric array with twelve 7-m antennas, and four single-dish 12-m antennas, CASA must support an analysis of both interferometric and single-dish data. The single-dish analysis part of CASA is being developed mainly by Japanese contribution based on an external software package ASAP (ATNF Spectral Analysis Package). CASA can perform a calibration, a baseline fitting, a flagging, an averaging, and a smoothing of spectral data using ASAP functionalities. In addition, CASA is capable of an imaging of single-dish data. CASA and ASAP consist of C++ ″engines″, which are a set of libraries for data analysis written in C++, and user interfaces written in Python. The C++ engines can be accessed from Python through interfaces that are implemented using CCM Tools (CASA) and Boost (ASAP). Notable feature of CASA is two types of user interface called a ″task″ and a ″tool″. The tool is direct interface to C++ engine classes and enables expert users to perform a flexible data processing. On the other hand, the task is constructed using several tools and provides handier interface that can be used by both expert and non-expert users. Our goal is to support all single-dish observing modes that will be implemented as standards of ALMA. These modes include various types of switching methods (position-switch via an antenna movement or a nutation of a sub-reflector, frequency-switch) and a combination of those with On-The-Fly (OTF) technique. In the current release, CASA is able to deal with the data obtained by classical switching methods, although some functionalities are still under development. Improvement of currently available functions and a support of an analysis of the OTF data will be implemented in the next release that is planned at the end of 2009.

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SIMPLE Imaging and Mosaicking PipeLinE
Wei-Hao Wang	Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics
The SIMPLE Imaging and Mosaicking PipeLinE (SIMPLE) is an IDL based data reduction environment designed for processing optical and near-IR data obtained from wide-field mosaic cameras. It has standard functions for flat fielding, sky subtraction, distortion correction, and photometric and astrometric calibrations. One of the key features of SIMPLE is the ability to correct for image distortion from a set of dithered exposures, without relying on any external information (e.g., distortion function of the optics, or an external astrometric catalog). This is achieved by deriving the first-order derivatives of the distortion function directly out of the dithered images. This greatly help to produce high accuracy on astrometry as well as preserve image sharpness in the mosaicked/stacked image. Despite being designed toward a general reduction environment, the current distribution of SIMPLE has two highly optimized packages, one for the Wide-field InfraRed Camera on the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope and the other for the Multi-Object InfraRed Camera and Spectrograph on the Subaru Telescope. SIMPLE has produced excellent (photometrically and astrometrically) wide-field images from both cameras. Users and the author of SIMPLE are also developing optimized SIMPLE pipelines for other mosaic cameras such as the Subaru Prime Focus Camera.

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Pipeline Processing for VISTA
James Robert Lewis	Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge
The VISTA telescope is a 4 metre instrument which has recently been commissioned at Paranal, Chile. Equipped with an infrared camera, 16 2Kx2K Raytheon detectors and a 1.7 square degree field of view, VISTA represents a huge leap in infrared survey capability in the southern hemisphere. Pipeline processing of IR data is far more technically challenging than for optical data. IR detectors are inherently more unstable, while the sky emission is over 100 times brighter than most objects of interest, and varies in a complex spatial and temporal manner. To compensate for this, exposure times are kept short, leading to high nightly data rates. VISTA is expected to generate an average of 250 GB of data per night over the next 5-10 years, which far exceeds the current total data rate of all 8m-class telescopes. In this presentation we discuss the pipelines that have been developed to deal with IR imaging data from VISTA and discuss the primary issues involved in an end-to-end system capable of: robustly removing instrument and night sky signatures; monitoring data quality and system integrity; providing astrometric and photometric calibration; and generating photon noise-limited images and science-ready astronomical catalogues. Some preliminary science results will be shown.

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Flexible operations planning data repository for space science missions
Juan C. Vallejo	GMV/ESAC
The number and complexity of space science missions continues to increase. The only way this growth can be maintained is to increase the cost effectiveness, as well as the performance, of operations. The biggest challenge in achieving this objective is to accommodate the technical, scientific and operation policy variability across and within missions. Such variability, by its very nature, prevents the development of one-fit-for all operation systems and leads to systems with high levels of adaptability. To date a bottom- up approach has been traditionally used to develop one mission from another. However, in order to be able to meet the above challenges, a top-down approach is the only approach which will allow the efficient development of such systems. The development of the Planning Repository (P-REP) follows this approach. It is being carried out, under ESA contract, by a consortium made of Grupo Mecanica de Vuelo (GMV) and of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (STFC/RAL). The purpose of the project is to specify, design and develop a prototype for a centralized information repository to store any relevant operation planning data for any past, current or future mission. Typical planning information that can be stored includes the predicted or measured events, constraints and/or rules, plans as well as any information that can help users to generate the latter. More specifically this type of information can be the result of the processing of downlinked data and contain, for example, Quick Look Analysis information and feedback of the science results from the PI teams. The data to be handled by the P-REP can be files, file content or any type of relevant planning information. To ensure its fast adaptability to new mission planning requirements, the P-REP is more than just a basic database. It provides a user environment that facilitates, in a secure and role-driven system, not only the access to the database content but also the adaptability of its external interfaces and of the user defined, mission specific data storage modeling. In addition, the architecture of the prototype itself is such that the P-REP core functionalities can be extended in the future with the potential to become a powerful complement to automated or manual planners. We will present the main ideas driving the project and its current status. We will also present how this project is positioned in a global effort for building generic science operation center frameworks (including data repositories, scheduling and planning systems and control centers, among others). We will show why this P-REP can be used not only for planetary missions, its original prime target, but also for any types of mission including observatory type missions. In conclusion, we believe the P-REP development is a key step towards this ambitious solution to the generic problem of performance and productivity increase.

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Design of Astrometric Mission(JASMINE) by applying Model Driven System Engineering
Yoshiyuki Yamada	Kyoto University, Department of Physics
We are planning space astrometric satellite mission named JASMINE. The mission aims to measure positions, proper motions, and parallaxes of 10,000 stars in the several square degrees area within the galactic bulge. Comparing other astronomical mission, the weight of data analysis is larger in astrometry. Collecting all data during the mission, estimate astrometric parameter by applying observation equations with least square fit. Stellar motion on the celestial sphere contains periodic motion with one year frequency. But it is impossible that the instrument is made to be stable in one year time scale. The target accuracy of parallaxes in JASMINE observation is 10 micro arcsecond, which corresponds to 1 nm scale on the focal plane. It is very hard to measure the 1 nm scale deformation of focal plane. Eventually, we need to add the deformation to the observation equations when estimating stellar astrometric parameters. In this situation, as the observation equations become more complex, we may reduce the stability of the hardware, nevertheless, we require the larger number of samplings due to the lack of rigidity of each estimation. That means this mission imposes a number of trade-offs in the engineering choices and then decide the optimal design from a vast of candidates. In order to efficiently illustrate and support such decisions through the development, we apply Model Driven Systems Engineering (MDSE) to JASMINE project. In this project, MDSE improves the efficiency of the engineering by revealing and formalizing requirements coming from various stake holders, such as Astronomical Scientists, Heat Control Engineers, and Data Analyst, by using constraints (called Feature Model). It improves the efficiency to adjust the conflicts of requirements of many viewpoints since the stake holders may understand various concerns through the formalized constraints and then IT system can mediate efficient collaboration by articulating what constraints are obstacles to satisfy the target and who are responsible for solving those concerns. In this talk, we reports the effects of application MDSE to JASMNIE project and its results.

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The Science and Operations Center for the James Webb Space Telescope
Joseph Anthony Pollizzi	Space Telescope Science Institute
The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is widely touted as the successor to the venerable Hubble Space Telescope. To be launched in the summer of 2014, JWST will be one of the largest and most sophisticated satellites ever built for scientific exploration. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) has the contract with NASA to design, develop and operate the JWST Science and Operations Center. For HST, a number of separate contractors built the equivalent center that the STScI then operated. Over time, STScI has integrated, maintained, and upgraded the HST SOC to successfully support the HST. Now, the STScI has the opportunity to leverage that twenty year experience of the lessons learned from operating the HST and evolving its systems to build the SOC for JWST from the ground up. This paper presents the architecture being planned, the lessons learned that are being applied and some of the challenges to be overcome in constructing the JWST SOC.

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The Time Series Center: A next generation search engine using semantics, machine learning, and GPGPU
Pavlos Protopapas	CfA
The Time Series Center is an interdisciplinary effort dedicated to creating the world′s largest database for astronomical and other time series and developing algorithms to understand various aspects of those time series. The partnership of the data center and the analysis effort makes discoveries of new and rare variability phenomena, and large scale studies of known phenomena possible. We describe in this talk the data resident now in the database and the plan for the near future, the architecture behind the data center and a highly interactive web based search and visualization application. We finally report on an automatic classification for stellar objects using machine learning techniques and semantic queries. We present the science results already obtained using the resources of the data center.

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When Time Is of the Essence
Arnold H Rots	Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory
When dealing with (or preserving) time series data, one does well to consider the circumstances under which the data were taken and the uses they may be put to. The higher the timing accuracy that is required, the more stringent will be the requirements for complete and accurate metadata. This paper presents a brief tutorial on time scales, time standards, and time metadata requirements. This includes issues like the difference between dynamic and coordinate time scales, relativistic effects, the connection with spatial coordinate information and barycenter corrections. In this context, we will also review the Virtual Observatory time standards and the proposed FITS Time standard - WCS Paper V. This work is supported by NASA contract NAS8-03060 (CXC).

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Transient Response Astronomy: How & Why
Rob Seaman	NOAO
A time domain tsunami threatens observational astronomy. Survey archives of the static sky have the chance to mature for several years before being published. But vast cascades of celestial transient events will be released from the very beginning of grand new projects such as the Large Synoptic Survey, Pan-STARRS and the Dark Energy Survey. Rapid follow-up combined with reliable semantic classification will be required for scientifically productive transient response observing modes. The VOEvent standard of the International Virtual Observatory Alliance is one ingredient for constructing flexible, efficient, autonomous architectures for carrying out experimental design when time is of the essence. We discuss constraints of scheduling, robotic control, observing modes, cadence, instrumentation, and telescope networking that will determine the success or failure of the systematic exploration of the terrain of time.

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Mixing Bayesian Techniques for Effective Real-time Classification of Astronomical Transients
Ashish A Mahabal	California Inst. of Technology
With the recent advent of time domain astronomy through various surveys several approaches at classification of transients are being tried. Choosing relatively interesting and rarer transients for follow-up is important since following all transients being detected per night is not possible given the limited resources available. In addition, the classification needs to be carried out using minimal number of observations available in order to catch some of the more interesting objects. We present details on two such classification methods: (1) using Bayesian networks with colors and contextual information, and (2) using Gaussian Process Regression and lightcurves. Both can be carried out in real-time and from a very small number of epochs. In order to improve classification i.e. narrow down number of competing classes, it is important to combine as many different classifiers as possible. We show how this can be incorporated in a higher order fusion network and tied with optimal follow-up.

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The NASA Exoplanet Science Institute Archives: KOA and NStED
Graham Bruce Berriman	IPAC, Caltech
The NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI) maintains a series of archival services in support of NASA′s planet finding and characterization goals. Two of the larger archival services at NExScI are the Keck Observatory Archive (KOA) and the NASA Star and Exoplanet Database (NStED). KOA, a collaboration between the W. M. Keck Observatory and NExScI, serves raw data from the High Resolution Echelle Spectrograph (HIRES) and extracted spectral browse products. As of June 2009, KOA hosts over 28 million files ( 4.7 TB) from over 2,000 nights. In Spring 2010, it will begin to serve data from the Near-Infrared Echelle Spectrograph (NIRSPEC). NStED is a general purpose archive with the aim of providing support for NASA′s planet finding and characterization goals, and stellar astrophysics. There are two principal components of NStED: a database of (currently) all known exoplanets, and images; and an archive dedicated to high precision photometric surveys for transiting exoplanets. NStED is the US portal to the CNES mission CoRoT, the first space mission dedicated to the discovery and characterization of exoplanets. These archives share a common software and hardware architecture with the NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (IRSA). The software architecture consists of standalone utilities that perform generic query and retrieval functions. They are called through program interfaces and plugged together to form applications through a simple executive library.

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An Overview of the Kepler Science Analysis System
David Ciardi	NExScI/Caltech
The NASA Exoplanet Science Institute (NExScI) at Caltech has developed the Kepler Science Analysis System (KSAS) for NASA′s exoplanet finding mission Kepler. Kepler was launched in March 2009 and has entered science operations. KSAS was built upon the same architecture used by NExScI′s NASA Star and Exoplanet Database (NStED), which was built upon the extensible Infrared Science Archive (IRSA). KSAS is used by the Kepler project to organize the targets and all data associated with the targets including preparatory data, mission data, follow-up data. KSAS also includes tools to enable target selection, target prioritization, data loading and mission product browsing. After initial development at NExScI, KSAS was packaged, delivered to NASA Ames and installed at Ames where it is currently in use by the Kepler project. KSAS, itself, is designed to be extensible and can be adapted for use by future exoplanet missions that NASA may support. An overview of KSAS is presented, highlighting the design and functions which have been built upon and adapted from the extensible IRSA/NStED architecture.

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The US-VAO Facility for Rapid Transients
Roy D Williams	Caltech
This is an overview of how the US-VAO can provide near-real-time notifications of transient astrophysical events, including pre-emptively fetched data from VO archives about possible precursors of that event, sophisticated triggers so customers get precisely what they want, and custom presentation for each type of event. The Facility will define each event stream in the VO Registry for uniform discovery, provide query services for past events, and build connections to automated telescopic follow-up systems. Many event providers are already on board, including NASA Fermi and SWIFT, LOFAR, Catalina Sky Survey, Pi of the Sky, and many others.

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The Palomar Transient Factory Pipeline and Archive
Carl Johann Grillmair	Spitzer Science Center, California Institute of Technology
The Palomar Transient Factory will conduct a wide-field, high-cadence optical survey of the northern sky to detect transient, variable, and moving objects. As a member of the PTF collaboration, the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center is developing an image archive, a high-quality photometry pipeline, and a searchable database of detected sources. The system is capable of processing and storing 300 Gbytes of data per night over the course of the 5-year survey. With an expected total of ~20-40 billion rows, the sources table will be among the largest databases ever created. The survey is efficiently discovering transient sources from asteroids to supernovae, and will inform the development of future sky surveys like the of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.

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Real-time X-ray transient monitor and alert system of MAXI on the ISS
Hitoshi Negoro	Nihon University, Department of Physics
Maxi, Monitor of All-sky X-ray Image, is launched with the space shuttle Endeavour this summer, and starts X-ray observation from the Japanese Experiment Module ″Kibo″ on the International Space Station, ISS. Two kinds of X-ray cameras have wide fields of view (160 deg x 1.5 deg (FWHM) for Gas Slit Cameras, GSCs, and 90 deg x 1.5 deg for Solid-state Slit Cameras, SSCs), and sensitivity at 2-30 keV and 0.5-10 keV for the GSCs and the SSCs, respectively. The GSCs and SSCs scan about 98 % and 70 % of all-sky every 96 minutes, respectively, and data obtained are downloaded every second through the ISS network. On the ground, we try to find transient objects such as X-ray novae, bursts including Gamma-ray bursts, various flares with Nova Search (X-ray transient monitor) systems, and send alert information to the world if discovered in 30 seconds after X-ray detection. Here we present the introduction of the MAXI Nova Search and alert system we have developed, and real performance in the first quarter year after the launch.

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Cycles of Activity: Acquiring, Preparing, and Exploiting X-ray Images of the Solar Corona
David E McKenzie	Montana State University
The relative nearness of the Sun, and its abundance of photons, yield the opportunity to see details on its face, and in its atmosphere. In principle, pointing a suitably designed telescope at the Sun allows measurement of features small enough to be grasped easily in our minds, with sizes measured in tens or hundreds of kilometers. Obviously the task is not so simple. To obtain scientifically useful images we must contend with a host of instrumental difficulties, detector features, and calibration uncertainties. I will briefly demonstrate some of the problems encountered, our attempts to work around them, and the results of our efforts, using data from two solar X-ray telescopes: the Yohkoh Soft X-ray Telescope, and the Hinode X-Ray Telescope. With this information as background, I will show some highlights of recent solar coronal physics, based on the Yohkoh and Hinode images.

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BAM/DASS: data analysis software for sub-microarcsecond astrometry device
Daniele Gardiol	INAF - Osservatorio Astronomico di Torino
The INAF - Osservatorio Astronomico di Torino is part of the Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) for Gaia, a cornerstone mission of the European Space Agency. Gaia will perform global astrometry by means of two telescopes looking at the sky along two different lines of sight oriented at a fixed angle, also called basic angle. Knowledge of the basic angle fluctuations at the sub-microarcsecond level over periods of the order of the minute is crucial to reach the mission goals. A specific device, the Basic Angle Monitoring, will be dedicated to this purpose. We present here the software system we are developing to analyse the BAM data and recover the basic angle variations. This tool is integrated into the whole DPAC data analysis software.

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Java and High performance computing in Gaia processing.
William J O'Mullane	ESA/ESAC
In recent years Java has matured to a stable easy-to-use language with the flexibility of an interpreter (for reflection etc.) but the performance and type checking of a compiled language. When we started using Java for astronomical applications around 1999 they were the first of their kind in Astronomy. Now a great deal of Astronomy software is written in Java as are many Business applications. We discuss the current environment and trends concerning the language and present an actual example of scientific use of Java for high-performance computing: ESA′s mission Gaia. The Gaia scanning satellite will perform a galactic census of about 1000 million objects in our galaxy. The Gaia community has chosen to write its processing software in Java. We explore the manifold reasons for choosing Java for this large science collaboration including recent sucess using the Amazon Cloud for AGIS.

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The Herschel Data Processing System ? HIPE and pipelines ? up and running since the start of the mission
Stephan Ott	ESA/ESTEC
The Herschel Space Observatory, the fourth cornerstone mission in the ESA science programme, was successfully launched 14th of May 2009. With a 3.5 m Cassegrain telescope it is the largest space telescope ever launched. Herschel′s three instruments (HIFI, PACS and SPIRE) perform photometry and spectroscopy in the 55 - 672 micron range and will deliver exciting science for the astronomical community during at least three years of routine observations. One month after launch, on its way to L2, the Lagrange point located 1.5 million kilometres away from the Earth, the cryostat lid was opened, and the first observational tests were conducted. Herschel reached its orbit around L2, and is currently beginning its performance verification phase. The development of the Herschel Data Processing System started seven years ago to support the data analysis for Instrument Level Tests. To fulfil the expectations of the astronomical community, additional resources were made available to implement a freely distributable user-friendly Data Processing System capable to interactively and automatically reduce Herschel data at different processing levels. The system combines for the first time data retrieval, pipeline execution and scientific analysis in one single environment. The software is coded in Java and Jython to be platform independent and to avoid the need for commercial licenses. We estimate that currently 250 astronomers are using the system. The Herschel Data Processing System is a joint development by the Herschel Science Ground Segment Consortium, consisting of ESA, the NASA Herschel Science Center, and the HIFI, PACS and SPIRE consortium members. The Herschel Interactive Processing Environment HIPE was designed as the user friendly face of Herschel Data Processing and presented during pre-launch workshops to the Herschel Key Program consortia where also the non-Java versant astronomers welcomed this state of the art interface to process Herschel data. The first PACS preview observation of M51 was processed within HIPE using basic pipeline settings and scripts to a fantastic image within 30 minutes of data reception. Also the first HIFI observations on DR-21 were successfully reduced to high quality spectra, followed by SPIRE observations on M66 and M74. Equally the operational pipelines demonstrated their state of maturity: Using the pre-launch version, all in-flight observations since the start of the mission were successfully processed. This includes the first in-flight observations, SPIRE manual commanding observations, PACS images of M51and HIFI high quality spectra of DR 21. At the time of the conference Herschel should be close to finishing its performance verification phase, and ready for the science demonstration phase when the first observations for Herschel Key Program consortia will be taken. Upon reception, the data are processed, quality controlled in the Herschel Science Centre and ingested into the Herschel Science Archive. We will summarise the current state of the Herschel Data Processing System and give an overview about future development milestones and plans. We will present some Herschel images and spectra to give an exciting foretaste of the science that is to come with Herschel.

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Critical Design Decisions of The Planck LFI Level 1 Software
Nicolas C. Morisset	ISDC, Data Centre for Astrophysics
The PLANCK satellite with two on-board instruments, a Low Frequency Instrument (LFI) and a High Frequency Instrument (HFI) has been launched on May 14th with Ariane 5. The ISDC Data Centre for Astrophysics in Versoix, Switzerland, in close collaboration with the Data Processing Centre (DPC) in Trieste, Italy, develops and maintains the Planck LFI Level 1 software for the DPC. The main tasks of the Level 1 processing are to retrieve the daily available raw telemetry data of the LFI instrument, the Sorption Cooler and the 4k Cooler from the Mission Operation Centre (MOC) in Darmstadt, generate Time Ordered Information (TOI), i.e. time series, for each scientific (SCI) and housekeeping (HK) parameter, archive the resulting TOI and subsequently ingest them into the Data Management Component (DMC) database. The Level 1 software has been designed and developed in order to support all phases of the Planck/LFI mission from the instrument ground tests (tuning and calibration) to the integration tests and the Flight operations. During the development process, from the Qualification Model (QM) of the software, where several ISDC components were reused, to the Flight Model (FM), critical design decisions were taken jointly with the DPC. The main questions were: a) Which data format do we choose: FITS or DMC? b) Which technology is more suitable to design and run the pipelines: do we use the Planck Process Coordinator (ProC), OPUS or simple Perl scripts ? c) Which components of the existing QM software need a refactoring or a complete redesign? d) Do we organize the data archive using a hierarchical directory structure or the FITS grouping? e) Do we reorganize and process the data stream into time slices or sequentially process the incoming telemetry packets? The timeline and available manpower are also important issues to be taken into account. We present here the orientation of our choices and discuss their pertinence based on the experience of the final pre-launch tests and the start of real Planck LFI operations.

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AD Conversion Revisited in the Frequency Domain
Yoshihiro Chikada	NAOJ
Analog-to-Digital conversion (ADC) is comprised of two steps. One is sampling and the other is quantization. A quantizer is a non-linear circuit which has stair case input-output characteristics. It is well-known that it creates noise whose power is 1/12 of the square of the step height provided that the step width is small enough compared to the input amplitude and that the quantizer has large enough number of steps to cover the input amplitude. Consider other example of a non-linear circuit such as a frequency conversion diode. In such frequency converters, if the setup is appropriate, we do not encounter noises which arise from the non-linearity. Where is the difference between an ADC and a frequency converter? Both have non-linearity whereas one produces noise and the other does not. Are there any ways to realize a noiseless ADC? The key is to think in the frequency domain. Non-linear circuit often produces harmonics and inter-modulated waves of the input wave. These are the noises, which can be filtered out with ′IF′ filter as in the frequency converters. We also discuss the possible roles of ′RF′ filter and ′LO′ for the ADC. In radio astronomy, to have bandwidth as wide as possible, ADCs with very small number of quantization levels (usually 2-8 levels) have been used. Therefore it is very important to develop means to minimize noises and/or spectrum deformation caused by an ADC. The Van Vleck correction or the quantization correction is known to correct the observed digitized correlation coefficient to the analog one. For an example, in a two level quantizer case, according to the correction the latter is proportional to arcsine of the former. The correction is conventionally understood via time domain joint probabilities between the digitized signals. We will show that this correction can also be reached analytically via frequency domain approach. According to the correction, there is a sudden rise in the correction curve when the observed correlation coefficient approaches to unity. Frequency domain approach shows that the rise is interpreted as the increase of correlation of higher order harmonics and inter-modulations. Implications derived from the frequency domain approach are discussed.

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A Scalable On-Demand Crossmatch Engine
Tamas Budavari	The Johns Hopkins University
We describe the design of a high-performance engine for cross-matching large astronomical catalogs. After a careful analysis of successes and failures of previous such services, we designed a new infrastructure that is inherently scalable to many concurrent queries and the largest jobs we face today. Speed improvements come from massive parallelization of the cross-match tasks on a cluster of database servers and optimized spatial indexing. The execution is driven by a workflow system that enables pausing and resuming or restarting the jobs, if needed. A novel probabilistic cross-identification algorithm is implemented that is based on Bayesian hypothesis testing (Budavari & Szalay 2008). We present its successful pilot applications on the SDSS, GALEX and Chandra catalogs, and detailed simulations with realistic variable errors. The system is designed to be flexible to include additional criteria of associations. Our new engine will from the core or the next-generation SkyQuery building on existing IVOA standards.

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Photometric determination of quasar candidates
Ninan Sajeeth Philip	St. Thomas College, Department of Physics
We describe an efficient and fast method for the detection and classification of quasars using a machine learning tool and photometric information from SDSS DR7 data release. The photometric information used are the nine independent colours that can be derived from the 5 filters available with SDSS and the machine learning algorithm used is a difference boosting neural network (DBNN) that uses Bayesian classification rule. The colour feature space of SDSS was divided into 4 subsets and the machine learning tool was trained on each subset independently. An adaptive learning algorithm was used to prepare the training sample for each region. Cross validations were done with SDSS spectroscopy and it was found that the method could detect quasars with above 90\% confidence regarding their true classification. The completeness at this stage was above 97\%. Contaminants were mainly stars and the failed quasars were from a few specific patches of redshifts. Color plots indicate that the colors of stars and quasars at those redshits were indistinguishable from each other and was the cause of their incorrect classifications. A confidence value (computed posterior Bayesian belief of the network) is assigned to every object that is classified. Almost all incorrect classifications have a low confidence value. This information can thus be used to filter out contaminants and thus improve the classification accuracy at the cost of reduced completeness.

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Centroiding experiment for determining the positions of stars with high precision
Taihei Yano	National Astronomical Observatory of Japan
Determination of the positions of star images on a detector with high precision is very important for astrometric technique that will be used for the observation of stars by a space astrometry satellite, such as JASMINE. JASMINE is the acronym of the Japan Astrometry Satellite Mission for INfrared Exploration, developed mainly at National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, and is planned to be launched around 2015. Aperture size of the telescope has a diameter of 30 cm. The main objective of JASMINE is to study the fundamental structure and evolution of the bulge components of the Milky Way Galaxy. In order to accomplish these objectives, JASMINE will measure annual parallaxes, positions and proper motions of stars during the observational program, with the precision of 10 microarcseconds. It is very important to ascertain by performing laboratory experiment that we can determine the positions of star images on the detector with high precision such as 10 microarcseconds. In order to determine centroid of star images, the central region of a star on the detector must be sampled by about a few pixels. In order to accomplish such a precision, we take the following two procedures. (1) We determine the positions of star images on the detector with the precision of about 0.01 pixel for one measurement, using an algorithm for estimating them from photon weighted means of the star images. (2) We determine the positions of star images with the precision of about 0.0001-0.00001 pixel, which corresponds to that of 10 microarcseconds, using a large amount of data over 10000 measurements, that is, the error of the positions decreases according to the amount of data. Here, we note that the procedure 2 is not accomplished when the systematic error in our data is not excluded adequately even if we use a large amount of data. We first show the method to determine the positions of star images on the detector using photon weighted means of star images. This algorithm, used in this experiment, is very useful because it is easy to calculate the photon weighted mean from the data. This is very important in treating a large amount of data. Furthermore, we need not assume the shape of the point spread function in deriving the centroid of star images. Second, we show the results in the laboratory experiment for precision of determining the positions of star images. We obtain that the precision of estimation of positions of star images on the detector is under a variance of 0.01 pixel for one measurement (procedure 1). We also obtain that the precision of the positions of star images becomes a variance of about 0.0001 pixel using about 10000 measurements (procedure 2).

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A Case Study in Web 2.0 Application Development
Paul Marganian	National Radio Astronomy Observatory, Green Bank
Recent web technologies focusing on languages, frameworks, and tools are discussed, using the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope′s (GBT) new Dynamic Scheduling System as the primary example. Within that example, we use a popular Python web framework, Django, to build the extensive web services for our users. We also use a second complimentary server, written in Haskell, to incorporate the core scheduling algorithms. We provide a desktop-quality experience across all the popular browsers for our users with the Google Web Toolkit and judicious use of JQuery in Django templates. Single sign-on and authentication throughout all NRAO web services is accomplished via the Central Authentication Service protocol, or CAS.

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USING MULTIPARTITE GRAPHS FOR RECOMMENDATION AND DISCOVERY
Michael J. Kurtz	Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Modern information systems, such as the ADS, act as a nexus, linking together many densely interconnected systems of information. These systems can be viewed as systems of interacting graphs; an example of a bipartite graph would be the interaction of the set of all papers with the set of all authors which yields connections between papers and papers (papers are connected if they have the same author) and between authors and authors (co-authorship). Modern computational techniques permit these rich data sources to be used to solve practical problems. Some techniques use the graph representation to achieve orderings, such as the Girvan-Newman 2002PNAS...99.7821G or Rosvall-Bergstrom 2008PNAS..105.1118R algorithms, or by eigenvector techniques on the interconnectivity or influence matrices, either using exact methods , e.g. Kurtz 1993ASSL..182...21K or approximate methods suitable for huge systems like PageRank http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/ Developing practical solutions to the problem: ″given my current state of knowledge, and what I am currently trying to do, what would be the best things for me to read?″ requires an in depth understanding of the properties of the data and the nature of the many different reduction techniques. The data is quite complex; as an example two papers (A and B) can be connected to each other because 1) A cites B; 2) B cites A; 3) A and B cite C; 4) author X wrote both A and B; 5) author X wrote a set of papers, at least one of which was cited by A and B; 7) A and B were read by the same person;8) A and B have the same key word; 9) A and B refer to the same astronomical object; 10) etc. A practical example of combining data and techniques to build a faceted browse system for current awareness would be: take a set of qualified readers, say persons who read between 30 and 100 papers in the main astronomy journals in the last three months; for each reader find the papers that reader read; for each of these papers find the papers that paper reference; for each of these papers find the keywords assigned to that paper by the journal; for each reader create a N dimensional normalized interest vector, where each dimension is a keyword and the amplitude represents the normalized frequency of occurrence in the papers cited by the papers read. This yields a reader-keyword matrix, one way to view this is that the readers are points in a multidimensional keyword space. Several things can be done with this matrix, for example if the readers are clustered, by K-means or some other algorithm, one obtains groups of readers with similar interests. These can be used as the basis of a collaborative filter, to find important recent literature of interest, and can also be subdivided, to narrow the subject (as defined by people with similar interests). This creates a faceted browse of important recent papers in subjects of current interest. The ADS has sufficient numbers of users to support three levels of facets.

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'SAMP'ling your browser for the Semantic Web
Sebastien Derriere	CDS, Observatoire de Strasbourg
SAMP, the Simple Application Messaging Protocol, is one of the successes of the Virtual Observatory (VO). By allowing communication between various applications, it enables easy data sharing, and facilitates data exploration, taking advantage of each application′s functionalities. SAMP can also be used to allow web browsers to interact with the VO. We will show for instance how Firefox can be complemented with a plugin allowing the user to send messages from any web page to existing VO applications. But there is more to be done in the context of the Semantic Web. Semantic annotations can be included in web pages using microformats or RDFa (Resource Description Framework in attributes). We will demonstrate how to take advantage of this semantic markup using SAMP. Annotated web pages can be consumed by a browser plugin to build dedicated SAMP contextual messages (e.g. pointing an application to sky coordinates present in the web page). This mechanism provides a generic yet powerful way to interact between, for example, an astronomical web portal and other VO tools.

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Data Visualisation, Statistics and Machine Learning
Ajit Keshav Kembhavi	Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics
Vast quantities of astronomical data can now be accessed through data archives and other sources. The data can be in highly processed form, presented as ready-to-use tables. Data on the same set of objects can be available over a wide range of wavelengths, which facilitates multiwavelength studies. The focus has therefore shifted from processing of raw data and images using a variety of techniques, to the scientific analysis of the processed data products. The data to be analyzed may involve only a few to several tens of objects, which have to be subjected to statistical studies, aided by advanced visualization. Or the data could be vast, perhaps even be spread over archives in more than one location, making it impractical to get it to the user′s end for analysis. These and other situations call for appropriate tools for visualization and sifting of the data, for advanced statistical analysis, and also for machine learning tools which can be applied in certain situations. Several sophisticated but easy to use tools for such analysis have been developed in recent years in the framework of Virtual Observatories. I will review in my talk some general aspects of astronomical data visualization and statistics, describe some of the important tools developed by different Virtual Observatory programmes, and illustrate their use with applications to some astronomical problems.

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Another way to explore the sky: HEALPix usage in Aladin full sky mode
Pierre Fernique	Strasbourg Observatory, CDS
The last few years have seen the emergence of a new feature in several astronomical visualization tools : the interactive sky browser supporting immediate panning and zooming. World Wind, Google Sky, World Wide Telescope, Wikisky, Virgo and now Aladin, all these tools have in common a view of the sky based on a hierarchical multi-resolution sky tessellation. The aim is to load and draw the good ″pieces″ of the sky at the good resolution as fast as possible, according to the current user sky view. The goal is the same but sky indexing solutions differ significantly and do not offer the same capabilities in term of performances, underlying data base complexity, available projections, projection distortion, pixel value access, graphical overlays, etc. Actually, most of the tools offer false-colour skies with a unique simple projection. But this new feature can be used not only for providing a sky background, but also for accessing and analyzing pixel data in the same way that astronomers commonly use FITS images for doing science. In this talk, we will present how Aladin is using an HEALPix sky tessellation for building a powerful sky data base. We will present the arguments in favor of HEALPix, notably: - The intrinsic qualities of HEALPix for implementing fast pixel algorithms such as convolutions, Fourier analysis, wavelet decomposition, nearest neighbor searches, topological analyses... - The hierarchical structure of the sky directly mapped in a simple directory tree, allowing immediate usage for local data; - The projection methods for reducing as much as possible the distortions notably at poles and at the ″sky borders″; - The available libraries, and especially the Java package supporting deep sky resolution; - Last but not least, the direct usage for current mission data such as Planck; - etc. We will also discuss about the compatibility/interoperability between all these tools and how we could avoid to duplicate these data bases and implement efficient collaboration. This might open the door to a future VO standard describing this new way to explore the sky.

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Visualization-directed interactive model fitting to spectral data cubes
Christopher Jon Fluke	Swinburne University of Technology, Centre for Astrophysics & Supercomputing
Spectral datasets from radiotelescopes and integral field units are increasing in complexity as new facilities and instruments come on line. With greater velocity resolution comes an increasing need to visualize and quantitatively analyse the velocity structures. As the visible structure in spectral datacubes is not purely spatial, additional insight is required to relate structures in 2D space plus line-of-sight velocity to their three-dimensional sources. This can be achieved through the use of simulations that are converted to velocity-space representations. We have used the S2PLOT programming library to enable intuitive, interactive comparison between 3D spectral data and models, with potential for improved understanding of the spatial configurations. We also report on our use of 3D shapelet decomposition to enable quantitative analysis of velocity structures from radiotelescope and integral field unit data. These approaches can be extended to studies in the time domain, by stacking sky images to form data cubes.

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Different Displays for Different Brains: How Neurology of Vision Effects Data Interpretation
Matt Schneps	CfA
When creating displays of scientific data an assumption is often made that all people perceive graphical data displayed on a screen in the same way. A complex chain of neurology mediates vision, and individual differences in neurology can alter how an individual perceives and interprets the data displayed. For example, there is evidence that dyslexia (a hereditary neurological condition associated with slowness in reading and/or difficulties with spelling) introduces a bias in visual perception favoring information in the visual periphery over that in the center. While this difference in neurology is predicted to make some tasks such as a search for detail hidden in an image more difficult, this neurology should facilitate performance on tasks that call for the integration of global information across a scene. We tested this hypothesis using a task designed to simulate the double-peaked graphical signature of radio spectra associated with black holes. We predicted that scientists with dyslexia would have an advantage in this black hole detection task. We investigated this hypothesis in a study of professional astrophysicists, and found in our preliminary analysis that the scientists with dyslexia are indeed, as predicted, better at identifying the simulated black holes when compared to their colleagues without dyslexia (b = -0.285, SE = 0.09, p <0.05). These findings illustrate how decisions made in the design of a graphical presentation can interact with an individual′s neurology to alter the scientific utility of the display. An understanding of how the neurology of vision varies among individuals can thus be used to inform the more effective display of scientific data. (Research supported by funds from the National Science Foundation, HRD-0726032.)

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Cognitive imaging in visual data-driven decision-support systems
Vladimir L. Gorohov	ENGECON State University
Within data-driven types of decision-support systems (DSS, DDDSS), visual decision-support systems are those that try to inspire operator to find solution (decision) by producing visual representation of the data. Traditional approaches, that utilize traditional scientific visualization techniques such as 2D and 3D plots, vector fields, surface maps etc, works well when subject to represent is relatively simply structured data, low-dimensioned and weak interconnected. However, modern scientific experiments, as those in astrophysics observations, generate huge volumes of multidimensional complicated data. More sophisticated approach for visualizing of big volumes of multidimensional data is that based on the cognitive machine graphics techniques, which, for example, are used in visualization system Space Walker (SW). In contrast to illustrative ones, the cognitive images are aimed to make clear and evident some difficult scientific concepts and promote us with a new knowledge. Three particular ideas form the subject of our research; first utilizing of non-parametrical statistics for data preparation and dynamical plane projection visualization method. These ensure that data visualization is not influenced by some model, what respectively gives possibility to use this approach in case of deep a priory uncertainty. Moreover, it allows simultaneous visualization of multidimensional data, what helps researcher to look into problem in large. Second connecting of descriptive imagination, intuition and experience through visualization of data via entertaining and aesthetically attractive images causes activation of intuitive descriptive thinking what in turn inspires operator for creative scientific ideas and nontrivial solutions. Finally compiling philosophical ideas from Husserl′s phenomenology we worked out particular algorithms for operator, which can rule him during his investigation, armed with cognitive visualization system. By combination of three described approaches, we achieve a new class of so called technognostic systems, which can effectively assist in solving scientific problems by intuition stimulation and inspiration. Several applications of algorithm with examples based on Space Walker software describe how cognitive graphics can help researcher to find out peculiarities and patterns in common catalogues of astrophysical observations. To sum up there is a list of potential advantages of cognitive DDDS systems compared to traditional DS systems: - Huge volumes of multidimensional data can be presented simultaneously - The operator when dealing with cognitive image is not influenced by outer models, what in turn allow to use systems in case of a deep a priory uncertainty - Existing data sets and archives can be used - Aesthetically attractive images and ability to operate on them like in 3D space allow researcher to utilize his knowledge in connection with boosted descriptive imagination - This phenomena in turn can inspire intuition for non-trivial decision and solutions The main goals of the paper are to describe the multidisciplinary approach we used in while working on the methodology of cognitive visualization and to show advantages and disadvantages of such system, and some possible future applications for them.

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WorldWide Telescope: A system of components enabling institutions to create rich web based data access and visualization tools.
Jonathan E Fay	Microsoft Research
WorldWide Telescope has grown from a standalone visualization platform to a rich set of components that can utilized by portals, data providers or research projects to allow rich data access to both catalog and image data. The WWT Client also provides SAMP enabled interoperability allow a suite of data services across client, web and server.

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The Virtual Observatory: Retrospective and Prospectus
Robert Hanisch	Space Telescope Science Institute
At the ADASS XV in San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Spain, in October 2005, I gave an overview of the accomplishments of the Virtual Observatory initiatives and discussed the imminent transition from development to operations. As I prepare this abstract, that transition remains on the horizon for the US Virtual Observatory, and VO projects worldwide have encountered various programmatic challenges. The successes of the Virtual Observatory are many, but thus far are primarily of a technical nature. We have developed a data discovery and data access infrastructure that has been taken up by data centers and observatories around the world. We have web-based interfaces, downloadable toolkits and applications, a security and restricted access capability, standard vocabularies, a sophisticated messaging and alert system for transient events, and the ability for applications to exchange messages and work together seamlessly. This has been accomplished through a strong collaboration between astronomers and information technology specialists. We have been less successful engaging the astronomical researcher. Relatively few papers have been published based on VO-enabled research, and many astronomers remain unfamiliar with the capabilities of the VO despite active training and tutorial programs hosted by several of the major VO projects. As we (finally!) enter the operational phase of the VO, we need to focus on areas that have contributed to the limited take-up of the VO amongst active scientists, such as ease of use, reliability, and consistency. We need to routinely test VO services for aliveness and adherence to standards, working with data providers to fix errors and otherwise removing non-compliant services from those seen by end-users. Technical developments will need to be motivated and prioritized based on scientific utility. We need to continue to embrace new technology and employ it in a context that focuses on research productivity.

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VAMDC: The Virtual Atomic and Molecular Data Centre
Nicholas Walton	Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge
There are many academic research groups playing a central role in the production of a vast range of atomic and molecular (AM) data, data that is of critical importance across a wide range of applications such as astrophysics, atmospheric physics, fusion, environmental sciences, combustion chemistry and in industrial applications from plasmas to lighting. Currently these vital and fundamental A&M resources are highly fragmented, available through a variety of interfaces, thus limiting the full exploitation of their scientific worth. This impacts negatively on research programmes across a wide range of topics from space exploration (the search for extra solar planets, understanding the chemistry of our local solar system, of the wider Universe), the study of the earths atmosphere, climate change, fusion programmes, and so forth. The Virtual Atomic and Molecular Data Centre (VAMDC) (see http://www.vamdc.eu) is a major new EU FP7 supported project which will create a secure, documented, flexible and interoperable e-science environment-based interface to existing Atomic and Molecular (AM) data. It will be built upon the expertise of existing AM data producers and service providers with the aim of creating an infrastructure that is easily tuned to the requirements of a wide variety of users in academic, governmental, industrial or public communities. VAMDC will be enabled by the utilisation of the excellent grid and Virtual Observatory (VO) data and application infrastructure that has been created across Europe by initiatives such as the Euro-VO (http://www.euro-vo.org) and EGI (http://web.eu-egi.eu/). We will provide a brief overview of the project, aims and key objectives: to implement the VAMDC interface for accessing major existing databases containing heterogeneous data and aimed at different users; enable data queries across multiple databases that are focussed on specific research topic(s); enable data publishing/quality control process for major A&M data producers; involve wide user and producer communities in development and use of VAMDC We describe the key infrastructure that will be created during the project lifetime, in particular we note the possible use of emerging VO standards in exposing AM data and resources, where extensions to these standards are required, and the challenges involved in bridging the demands of astronomy users with those of other domains. We outline the initial baseline VAMDC service infrastructure plan and use of relevant VO infrastructure developed in the context of the Euro-VO. The VAMDC consortium is led by CNRS, France (LPMAA, Universite Paris 6; Observatoire de Paris; Observatoire de Bordeaux; Observatoire de Grenoble; Institut Carnot de Bourgogne; GSMA, Universite de Reims; CESR, Toulouse ), and includes the University of Cambridge, University College London, Open University, Queen′s University Belfast, UK; Universitaet Wien, Austria; Uppsala Universitet, Sweden; Universitaet zu Koeln, Germany; Osservatorio Astronomico di Cagliari-INAF, Italy; Astronomska Opservatorija, Serbia; Institute for Spectroscopy RAS, Russian Federal Nuclear Centre All-Russian Institute of Technical Physics, Institute of Atmospheric Optics, Institute of Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences; Corporacion Parque Tecnologico de Merida, Venezuela. VAMDC commenced in July 2009 and runs until the end of 2012.

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A VO-driven National Astronomical Data Grid in China
Chenzhou CUI	National Astronomical Observatory of China
In the next few years, there will be much change in the observational astronomy field in China. LAMOST telescope is stepping into commission period; Antarctic observatory at Doom A will be put into operation; many existing instruments will be improved. We begin to face large datasets from various observation projects. Furthermore, more and more simulation data is accumulated. Starting from LAMOST spectrum archives, Qinghai 13.7m radio telescope archive and Shanghai simulation datasets, China-VO project is planning a VO-driven national astronomical data grid environment. The main aim is providing basic catalog-level and file-level data access functions. Several VO related modelers, for example, iRODS, VOSpace, TAP, and Registry are considered to integrate into the platform. Latest progress from the LAMOST project, brief information about some other projects in China, our initial plan for the national data grid platform will be introduced in my talk.

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Transparent scientific usage as the key to success of the VO

Igor V. Chilingarian

Observatoire de Paris, LERMA

Nowadays, following years of technological development, Virtual Observatory standards, resources, and services became powerful enough to help astronomers making real science on everyday basis. The key to the VO success is its entire transparency for a scientific user. This allows an astronomer to combine ``online′′ VO-enabled parts with ``offline′′ research stages including dedicated data processing and analysis, observations, numerical simulations; and helps to overpass one of the major issues that most present-day VO studies do not go further than data mining. Here I will present three VO-science projects combining VO and non-VO blocks, all of them resulted in peer-reviewed publications submitted to major astronomical journals.

(1) We have used a VO-fed workflow to automatically analyse a large amount of HST data and discovered a population of compact elliptical (M32-like) galaxies in nearby clusters. Some of these galaxies were later observed with the 6-m telescope to confirm their membership in the clusters, some others were confirmed by analysing archival spectra also available in the VO. We have performed dedicated numerical simulations to model their origin by the tidal stripping, demonstrating the importance of this galaxy evolution mechanism.

(2) We have cross-identified three large sources of photometric data: GALEX GR4 (UV), SDSS DR7 (optical), UKIDSS DR5 (NIR) and compiled a homogeneous FUV-to-NIR catalogue of spectral energy distributions of nearby galaxies (0.03

(3) The GalMer database is a part of the Horizon project, providing access to a library of TreeSPH simulations of galaxy interactions. We have developed a set of value-added tools related for data visualization and post-processing with available VO-interfaces, including the spectrophotometric modelling of galaxy properties, making GalMer the most advanced resource providing online access to the results of numerical simulations. These tools allow direct comparison of simulations with imaging and spectroscopic observations.

Presentation of these three examples aim at stimulating usual astronomers to carry out VO-enabled research on everyday basis. Although minor infrastructural difficulties still exist, VO-enabled research beyond data mining is already possible. We foresee a growing amount of VO-powered studies to arrive in near future.

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Lessons Learned during the Development and Operation of Virtual Observatory
Masatoshi Ohishi	National Astronomical Observatory of Japan
In the last a few years several Virtual Observatory (VO) projects have entered from the research and development phase to the operations phase. The VO projects include AstroGrid2 (UK), Virtual Astronomical Observatory (former National Virtual Observatory, USA), EURO-VO (EU), Japanese Virtual Observatory (Japan), and so on. These successful transitions from the develpment phase to the operations phase owes primarily to the concerted action to develop standard interfaces among the VO projects in the world, that has been conducted in the International Virtual Observatory Alliance. The registry interface has been one of the most important key to share among the VO projects and data centers (data providers) with the observed data and the catalog data. Data access protocols and/or language (SIAP, SSAP, ADQL) and the common data format (VOTable) are other keys. Consequently we are able to find scientific papers so far published (see, e.g., the IVOA Newsletter, Issue No.2, http://www.ivoa.net/newsletter/002/). However, we had faced some experience during the implementaion process as follows: 1) At the initial stage of the registry implementation, some fraction of the registry meta data were not correctly set, or some meta data were missing. IVOA members found that it would be needed to have validation tools to check the compliance before making the interface public; 2) It seemed that some data centers and/or data providers might find some difficulties to implement various standardized interfaces (protocols) in order to publish their data through the VO interfaces. If there were some kind of VO interface toolkits, it would be much ieasier for the data centers to implement the VO interfaces; 3) At the current VO standardization, it has not been discussed in depth on the quality assurance on the published data, or how we could provide indice on the data quality. Such measures would be quite helpful for the data users in order to judge the data quality. It would be needed to discuss this issue not only within IVOA but with observatories and data providers; 4) Past and current development in the VO projects have been drived from the technology side. However, since the ultimate purpose of the VOs is to accerelate getting astronomical insights from, e.g., huge amount of data or multi-wavelength data, science driven advertisement (including schools to train astronomers) would be needed; 5) Some data centers and data providers mentioned that they need to be credited. In the Data-Centric science era it would be crucial to explicitly respect the observatories, data centers and data providers; 6) And others. I would like to discuss the above issues in my talk.

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Theoretical Virtual Observatory services at VO-Paris Datacentre
Franck Le Petit	LUTH - Paris Observatory
If important efforts have been realized to develop standards and publish observational data through the Virtual Observatory, significant efforts are also done to publish and develop theoretical VO services. Indeed, a scientific return of large observational facilities will only be possible if the community has access to state of the art simulation codes and simulation results. Several teams of VO-Paris Datacentre develop VO theoretical services and participate to the definition of VO-Theory standards. In this talk, I will present some of our services. First, I will present the Meudon PDR code services. The Meudon PDR code is a public code computing the structure of interstellar neutral clouds. It solves in a consistent way the radiative transfer from UV to sub millimeter, the chemistry and the thermal balance. This code has been used to interpret observations of diffuse clouds (FUSE and HST/STIS observations), PDRs (ISO, VLT observations) and dark clouds (ex: IRAM observations), etc. It will be used to interpret HERSCHEL observations for several key programs. To facilitate the use of the code, we developed two kind of services: an online version of the code integrated in Astrogrid with computing resources on demand and a PDR VO-Theory database to facilitate the interpretation and the preparation of the observations of the next generation of instruments as HERSCHEL and ALMA. I this first part, I will present the services and how the Virtual Observatory facilitated the development of these services. Then, I will present the STARFORMAT project, funded by Astronet. I will focus on the dense cores simulations VO-database that will provide to the community state of the art MHD simulation results and properties of dense cores (density, velocity, magnetic field profiles,). These projects, PDR and STARFORMAT, will lead to the development of a platform of theoretical services to interpret observations in the Interstellar Medium. I will then finished, presenting the Dark Energy Universe Database developed at LUTH - Paris Observatory. This project aims at providing large-scale cosmological simulations with different cosmological scenarios.

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Status of GDL - GNU Data Language
Alain Coulais	LERMA, CNRS
Gnu Data Language (GDL) is an open-source interpreted language aimed at numerical data analysis and visualisation. It is a free implementation (under GNU GPL licence) of the Interactive Data Language (IDL) widely used in Astronomy. GDL has a full syntax compatibility with IDL, and includes a set of more than 350 library routines targeting advanced matrix manipulation, plotting, time-series and image analysis, mapping, and data input/output including numerous scientific data formats. We will present the current status of the project, the key accomplishments, and the weaknesses - areas where contributions are welcome! GDL is written in C++, the library routines make use of numerous open-source libraries including: the GNU Scientific Library (GSL), the Plplot plotting library, FFTW Fourier transform package. Data input/output is managed using ImageMagick, NetCDF, HDF and HDF5 libraries. Large part of Astron Library is working well in GDL, including the FITS part. XDR files can be read and write. GDL features a Python bridge (Python code can be called from GDL, GDL can be compiled as a Python module). Packaged versions of GDL are available for several platforms including Max OS X, Debian and Ubuntu, Fedora and Red Hat, Gentoo and *BSD. The source code compiles on most Linux distributions and other UNIX systems (e.g. OpenSolaris). The core components of GDL (i.e. interpreter, library routines API, key data manipulation and plotting functionality) are stable and do not pose efficiency problems (no significant discrepancy from IDL performance). GDL still lacks the IDL widget functionality for GUI-development, but partial support should appear soon. We hope to consolidate the users community, to gather feedback in form of bug reports, feature requests, test routines, documentation and patches (several GDL modules have been provided by scientists who wrote the functions for their own work).

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Floor Demos

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:02:30 +0900

Spitzer Heritage Archive Demo PDF
Trey Roby	Caltech / IPAC
Spitzer Heritage Archive will be released to the public in January 2010. This AJAX-based web application requires no plug-ins but contains advanced web technologies such as a true FITS viewing, interactive tables, field validation, and many other features that have historically only been available as a desktop application. Watching the demo makes it easy to forget that we are using a web browser! It also compliments two invited talks ″Archive Web sites using AJAX & GWT″ (given by Trey Roby) and ″Spitzer Heritage Archive″ (given by Xiuqin Wu). The heritage archive system will initially contain the raw and final reprocessed cryogenic science products, and will eventually incorporate the final data products from the Spitzer Warm Mission. It has been designed and developed under collaboration of Spitzer Science Center(SSC) and NASA/IPAC InfraRed Science Archive (IRSA). It took advantage of the SSC and IRSA existing technology and knowledge base. In August 2003, NASA launched Spitzer. During its mission, Spitzer obtained images and spectra by observing between wavelengths of 3 and 180 microns with three instruments: IRAC, IRS, and MIPS. Its cryo mission ended May 2009. \Spitzer is now in the warm mission, observing in 3.6 and 4.5 microns using IRAC instrument.

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WorldWide Telescope Demo Booth
Jonathan E Fay	Microsoft Research
WorldWide Telescope is a non-commercial project from Microsoft Research designed to provide application, services, tools and data to astronomy researchers, educators and the public. WorldWide Telescope provides rich visualization of Multispectral Deep Sky Data, Planetary data including the Earth, and 3d data visualization of parallax, red-shift and simulation data.

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YOUPI Pipeline
Mathias Monnerville	Terapix, Institut d'Astrophysique de Paris, UPMC, CNRS
Youpi stands for ″YOUpi is your processing PIpeline″. It is a modern, easy to use yet powerful web application providing high level functionality to perform data reduction on FITS images. Built on top of various open source reduction tools released to the community by TERAPIX, Youpi can organize your data, manage your processing jobs on a cluster in real time (using Condor) and facilitate teamwork by sharing results and data between users. Built from the ground up with modularity in mind, Youpi comes with plugins allowing to perform, from within a browser, various processing tasks such as evaluating the quality of incoming images (using the QualityFITS software package), computing astrometric and photometric solutions (using SCAMP), resampling and co-adding FITS images (using SWarp) and extracting sources and building source catalogues from astronomical images (using SExtractor). Whether you are dealing with small to medium-sized data reduction projects, Youpi can be a powerful alternative to other pipeline data reduction software. Youpi is free software and is released under the GNU General Public License.

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Modular Pipelines and Scientific Workflows at ESO
Klaus Banse	ESO
CPL based pipelines for the VLT instruments on Paranal are in operational use since many years at ESO. Currently, we′re working on an infrastructure enabling the observers to rerun the data reductions which were performed during pipeline processing. Therefore, the complex pipeline recipes are split up into smaller, meaningful modules which are executable within our graphical, scientific workflow system, ESO-Reflex. In Reflex these modules can then be chained together to execute the same overall pipeline reduction as the original recipe, but with the possibility of fine tuning the parameters for the different subrecipes, repeating a given sequence of recipes, or interrupting the pipeline at any time to inspect intermediate results. We′ll demonstrate ESO′s work in progress on the workflow system using the HAWK-I pipeline.

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Building Astronomical Databases with Saada PDF
Laurent MICHEL	Universite de Strasbourg
A lot of astronomers would like to share datasets with the community but have no manpower to develop databases providing functionalities with high scientific level. The Saada project aims at helping them by automatically generating from data files databases (SaadaDBs) located on any local computer. SaadaDBs can simultaneously host heterogeneous sets of spectra, images, source lists or any other files. Data stored in SaadaDBs can be correlated each to others with qualified links helping for example for cross-identifications or for modeling some other scientific content. The query engine is based on a specific language (SaadaQL) fitting well the data model. In addition with classical astronomical queries, it can process constraints on correlated data. Databases created by SAADA can be accessed by a WEB interface allowing data browsing or data selection with complex queries. They also implements VO protocols and data models providing then a solution to publish local data into the VO.

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Chandra Source Catalog Data Access and Analysis
Mark L. Cresitello-Dittmar	Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, CXC
The initial release of the Chandra Source Catalog (CSC) was published in March 2009, and includes information for approximately 95,000 point and compact X-Ray sources. These sources were detected from a subset of public ACIS imaging observations taken during the first eight years of the Chandra mission. The CSC entries contain statistical characteristics of commonly tabulated quantities, including source position, extent, multi-band fluxes, hardness ratios, and variability statistics. In addition, the CSC includes an extensive set of file-based data products including source images, event lists, light curves, and spectra.To access and analyze this catalog, the Chandra X-ray Center (CXC) offers numerous interfaces along with our standard data analysis package CIAO. The first set of new tools used in the Catalog Processing pipeline have been released in CIAO 4.1.2. We plan to demonstrate these public interfaces and analysis tools available to Chandra users and highlight some of the new applications. The demos include: CSCView, a Java GUI to the catalog which provides access to Chandra data for sources matching user-specified search criteria; DS9 Catalog tool interface to access and display data from the catalog; A registered IVOA Simple Cone Search service which enables VO-aware applications such as DataScope, TOPCAT, and WWT to retrieve tabulated CSC source data; Google Earth, an interface for visualizing Field-of-Views, images and obtaining summary source information; and new CIAO tools including srcextent and modelflux, which use our fitting application Sherpa to calculate source properties.

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Poster Abstracts

Tue, 15 Sep 2009 14:01:37 +0900

Name	Organization	Title
Anastasia Alexov	University of Amsterdam, Astronomical Institute Anton Pannekoek (API)	The LOFAR Pulsar Data Pipeline PDF
Christophe Joel Barache	Observatoire de Paris, Laboratoire Syrte	The construction of the Large Quasar Astrometric Catalogue (LQAC) PDF
Paul E Barrett	US Naval Observatory	From Start to Finish: Python for Space Missions PDF
Monica Fernandez-Barreiro	Science Archives Team (SAT) - ESAC/ESA	ESA New Generation Science Archives: New technologies applied to Graphical User Interface creation PDF
Benjamin Robert Barsdell	Swinburne University, Centre for Astrophysics and Supercomputing	Advancing Computational Astronomy on Advanced Architectures PDF
Stephane Beland	University of Colorado, Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy	Preliminary Wavelength Calibration for Cosmic Origins Spectrograph
David Stuart Berry	Joint Astronomy Centre, Hawaii	Using the AST library to create and use STC-S region descriptions PDF
Juergen Berwein	Max Planck Institute for Astronomy	Rapid SOA frontend design and prototyping for LINC-NIRVANA
Thomas Boch	CDS, Observatoire de Strasbourg	The CDS Portal, a unified way to access CDS services PDF
Florian Briegel	Max Planck Institute for Astronomy	Management of astronomical software projects with open source tools. PDF
C. M. Hubert Chen	California Institute of Technology	A distributed, real-time data monitoring system as ground support equipment for balloon-borne astronomy experiments PDF
Fabien Chereau	ESO	A meta-data layer for astronomical archives PDF
Andre Csillaghy	U. of Applied Sciences North Western Switzerland, Inst. of 4D Technologies	The Heliophysics Integrated Observatory HELIO PDF
Lindsey E. Davis	National Radio Astronomy Observatory	The ALMA Pipeline Heuristics Package Interface PDF
Lander de Bilbao	ESO / FECYT	Multithreading for ESO Pipelines PDF
Arancha Delgado	European Southern Observatory	Instrumental Provenance of ESO Archival Data PDF
Rosa I Diaz	Space Telescope Science Institute	The HST Exposure Time Calculators: Estimating accurate observing times for HST Observations PDF
Rick Ebert	California Institute of Technology, NED	NED Spectra Data Service
Alessandro E. Ederoclite	Instituto de Astrofisica de Canarias	The Data Reduction System for GTC/OSIRIS. PDF
Satoshi Eguchi	Kyoto University, Department of Astronomy	Development of Image Analysis Software of MAXI PDF
Michael J Fitzpatrick	National Optical Astronomy Observatory	DTS: The NOAO Data Transport System. PDF
Niall Gaffney	Space Telescope Science Institute	History and future of the STScI DADS archive system. PDF
Erik Edward Gottschalk	Fermilab	A Concept for JDEM Science Computing and Operations PDF
Gretchen R Greene	STScI	HLA Footprints for Multi-Purpose Science PDF
Michael Allan Kalmar Gross	Universities Space Research Association	Pointing the SOFIA Telescope
Jonas Haase	ST-ECF	HST Cache: Update
Kirill A. Halin	Stavropol State University, Department of Physics	The study of the mechanism of cumulative generation of streams for the model of active astronomical object. PDF
Amr Hassan	Centre for astrophysics and supercomputing, Swinburne University of Technology - Melbourne , Australia	GPU-Based Volume Rendering of Noisy Multi-Spectral Astronomical Data PDF
Arturo A. Hoffstadt	Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria, Computer Systems Research Group	Reusable state machine code generator PDF
Mark S Holliman	University of Edinburgh, Institute for Astronomy, Wide Field Astronomy Unit	Virtual Observatory Services at WFAU PDF
Wolfgang Hovest	Max-Planck-Institute for Astrophysics	Planck Surveyor Mission: Methods for Optimizing the Data Analysis with the Software Infrastructure ProC
Aitor L Ibarra	XMM-Newton SOC. ESAC/ESA	XMM-Newton Science Analysis Software: Further development and maintenance... and also thinking about the future. PDF
Norio Ikeda	Institute of Space and Astronautical Science/Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency	Cube FITS Analyzer FAZZ in IDL PDF
Ryoji Ishiwata	Nihon University, Department of Physics	MAXI Nova Search and Alert System
Emmanuel Joliet	esac/esa	A new generic way to define astrometric calibration for Gaia data processing. PDF
Mitsuhiro Kohama	Cosmic Radiation lab. RIKEN / MAXI ISS ISAS JAXA	How to get MAXI data from http://maxi.riken.jp ?
Martin Kuemmel	Space Telescope - European Coordinating Facility	aXeTwoZero: The next generation of aXe PDF
Uwe Lammers	European Space Agency	Faster, better, cheaper: News on seeking Gaia's Astrometric Solution with AGIS PDF
ANDREA LARUELO	ESAC	ESA Archives and VO tools: without frontiers. PDF
Ignacio Leon	Science Archives Team (SAT) - ESAC/ESA	ESA New Generation Science Archives: State of the art data management techniques for SOHO and EXOSAT Science Archives PDF
Lan Lin	Universities Space Research Association	An End-to-End Solution for Archiving, Monitoring, Retrieval, and Post-Processing Archive Files for SOFIA PDF
Joao S. Lopez	Universidad Te;cnica Federico Santa Maria	A Reference Architecture Specification of a Generic Telescope Control System PDF
Sin'itirou Makiuti	Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency	Data processing for AKARI Far-Infrared All-Sky Catalogue
Areg Martin Mickaelian	Byurakan Astrophysical Observatory (BAO)	Spectra extraction and analysis software for the Digitized First Byurakan Survey (DFBS) and research projects PDF
Arik William Mitschang	SAO	TGCat, The Chandra Transmission Grating Catalog and Archive PDF
Marco Molinaro	INAF - Trieste Astronomical Observatory	VO compliant visualization of theoretical data PDF
Koh-Ichiro Morita	National Astronomical Observatory Japan	Optimizing Spatial Frequency Data Weights for High Precision Imaging with ALMA
Eric Hildau Neilsen	Fermilab	A Prototype Data Processing System for JDEM PDF
Jon G. Nielsen	Australian National University, Mount Stromlo Observatory	MSOTCS: A new Telescope Control System for the Australian National University's 2.3m telescope at Siding Spring Observatory PDF
Se-Jin Oh	Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute	High-speed Korea-Japan Joint VLBI Correlator(KJJVC) development and its current progress PDF
Luigi Paioro	INAF-IASF Milano	Toward a reference implementation of a standardized astronomical software environment. PDF
Sunyoup Park	Korea Astronomy & Space Science Institute (KASI)	Development of the software for high speed data transfer of the > > high-speed, large capacity data archive system for the storage of the correlation data from Korea - Japan Joint VLBI Correlator(KJJVC)
Sergio Pascual	Madrid Complutense University, Astrophysics Department	Data Reduction Pipeline for EMIR, the GTC Near-IR Multi-Object Spectrograph PDF
Fabio Pasian	INAF	Integrated e-infrastructures for astrophysics PDF
Alexey Pavlov	MPIA	LOPS - towards a science driven observation preparation tool
William D. Pence	NASA/GSFC	Optimal Compression Methods for Floating-point Format Images PDF
Francois-Xavier Pineau	Observatoire Astronomique de Strasbourg	Efficiencies of various classification methods applied to XMM-Newton sources PDF
Nor Pirzkal	STScI	NICMOS Temperature Dependent Calibration PDF
Daniel Pomarede	CEA/IRFU	Visualization of ASH Simulations of Stellar MHD with SDvision PDF
Bruno Correa Quint	University of Sao Paulo; Institute of Astronomy, Geophysics and Atmosphere Sciences; Department of Astronomy	Illusion - A Fabry-Perot Data-Cube Synthesizer. PDF
Frederic Raison	ESA/ESAC	Implementation of the global parameters determination in Gaia's Astrometric Solution (AGIS). PDF
Johnny William Reveco	Associated Universities, Inc. (AUI)	Extending the device support for the ALMA Control subsystem code generation framework
Tsuyoshi Sakamoto	Japan Spaceguard Association	A fast asteroid detection algorithm PDF
Juande Santander Vela	European Southern Observatory	Data Provenance: Use Cases for the ESO archive, and interactions with the Virtual Observatory PDF
Yuji Shirasaki	NAOJ, ADC	Environment Study of AGNs at z = 0.3 to 3.0 using the Japanese Virtual Observatory PDF
Dan Starr	UC Berkeley, Department of Astronomy	Real-Time Discovery and Classification of Sparsely Sampled Science Using Berkeley's Transient Classification Pipeline PDF
Ian M. Stewart	University of Cape Town, Department of Astronomy.	Parallel CLEAN: beyond the frequency domain. PDF
Elizabeth B Stobie	National Optical Astronomy Observatory	User Support in the Virtual Astronomical Observatory
Felix Stoehr	ST-ECF/ESO	The HST Cache - Metadata and Services PDF
Ole Streicher	Astrophysikalisches Institut Potsdam	The next generation MUSE 3D spectroscopy visualization and analysis tool
Kanako Sugimoto	NAOJ	Single dish observation simulator in CASA
Shigeru Takahashi	Nobeyama Radio Observatory, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan	Doppler Shift Correction for 2SB Receivers of the 45m Telescope at the Nobeyama Radio Observatory PDF
Satoshi Takita	ISAS/JAXA	Development of AKARI reduction tools for IRC slow-scan
Takayuki Tamura	ISAS/JAXA	Data Archive and Transmission System (DARTS) of ISAS/JAXA
Masahiro Tanaka	University of Tsukuba, Center for Computational Sciences	Impact of Gfarm, a Wide-area Distributed File System, upon Astronomical Data Analysis and Virtual Observatory. PDF
Harry Isaac Teplitz	IRSA	Building the Spitzer Source List PDF
Rodrigo Javier Tobar	Universidad Tecnica Federico Santa Maria	Adding support to ACS for Real-Time operations through the usage of a POSIX-compliant RTOS PDF
Albert Torrent	University of Girona - ESQ-6750002-E	A Boosting approach for the detection of faint compact sources in wide field aperture synthesis radio images PDF
Tomofumi Umemoto	National Astronomical Observatory of Japan	Concept of VSOP-2 Science Operation Center (SOC: tentative)
Vladimir V. Vitkovskiy	Special Astrophysical Observatory of RAS, Informatics Department	6D visualization of multidimensional data by means of cognitive technology PDF
Marc Wenger	Strasbourg Observatory, C.D.S.	Data mining in the SIMBAD database log files PDF
Andreas Wicenec	European Southern Observatory	The ALMA Front-end Archive Setup and Performance PDF
Tom Winegar	Subaru Telescope - NAOJ	STARS 2 - 2nd generation open-source archiving and query software for the Subaru Telescope PDF
Sherry L Winkelman	Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory	BibCat: The Chandra Data Archive Bibliography Cataloging System PDF
Masafumi YAGI	National Astronomical Observatory of Japan	An algorithm of refinement of image alignment for image subtraction PDF
Chisato Yamauchi	Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, Center of Science-satellite Operation and Data Archive	SFITSIO -- A next-generation FITS I/O library for C/C++ users PDF
Honglin Ye	National Radio Astronomy Observatory	A Simple Implementation of a 3D Data Cube viewer PDF
Mauricio Alejandro Zambrano	Associated Universities, Inc.	Experiences Virtualizing ALMA Software PDF
Nelson R Zarate	Gemini Observatory	NICI Python Data Reduction PDF
Ivan Zolotukhin	Sternberg Astronomical Institute, Moscow State University	Grown up with the VO /The VO-powered PhD thesis PDF

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Tue, 15 Sep 2009 13:02:30 +0900

| FLOOR DEMOS | FOCUS DEMOS | BOF SESSIONS |

Floor Demos Instructions

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 18:11:16 +0900

1. Floor Demo Exhibit Fees Floor demo space is provided at the cost of 50,000 JPY. Please log into your registration account to complete payment of exhibit fees. 2. Floor Demo Setup Floor Demos will be setup in the B1F Ballroom Lobby of the Renaissance Hotel. Demos can be setup on Sun. Oct. 4 from 15:00 to 17:00. For your demo, we will provide you with: * a table 900 (H) mm X 1800 (W) mm * two chairs * a panel board for poster materials, located behind the table 1800 (H) mm X 1800 (W) mm * power supply * Internet connectivity 3. Shipping If you intend to ship equipment etc. to the hotel please label your shipments as follows: Name: Kana Ohta ADASS2009 Conference Local Organizing Committee Address: Renaissance Sapporo Hotel 1-1 Toyohira 4-jo 1-chome, Toyohira-ku Sapporo 062-0904, Japan TEL: 81-11-821-1111 Shipments should be scheduled to arrive no earlier than Sat.Oct. 3. Please make arrangement with your shipping company to return the equipment also as you may find this difficult to arrange locally in Sapporo. Please inform us in advance if you intend to ship equipment. 4. Demo Period/Removal Demo's will be setup in the lobby from Sun. Oct. 4 - Wed. Oct. 7. Removal of equipment should be made on ther evening of Wed. Oct. 7 from 18:00 to 19:00.

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Supported by

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:29:50 +0900

	City of Sapporo
	Sapporo International Communication Plaza Foundation
	Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC)
	Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS)
	Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO)
	Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI)
	Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope (CFHT)
	National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO)
	National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO)
	European Space Agency (ESA)
	European Southern Observatory (ESO)

Hosted by

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:20:00 +0900

National Astronomical Observatory of Japan

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Tue, 26 May 2009 17:55:49 +0900

Inquiries for Abstract Submission, Registration and Payment ADASS2009 Japan Executive Committee Office c/o e-side, inc. 2F Keio University Collaboration Complex 4-1-1 Hiyoshi, Kohoku-ku, Yokohama Kanagawa 223-8526, Japan Fax: +81-45-534-3882 E-mail: info [at] adass2009.jp

Inquiries

Tue, 26 May 2009 16:59:46 +0900

	Fujitsu Limited
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ADASS2009

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