Photographic plates preceded photographic film as a capture medium in photography. The light-sensitive emulsion of silver salts was coated on a glass plate, typically thinner than common window glass. They were heavily used in the late 19th century and declined through the 20th. They were still used in some communities until the late 20th century.
Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) is an open standard defining a digital file format useful for storage, transmission and processing of data: formatted as multi-dimensional arrays, or tables. FITS is the most commonly used digital file format in astronomy. The FITS standard was designed specifically for astronomical data, and includes provisions such as describing photometric and spatial calibration information, together with image origin metadata.
The SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is an online database of over 16 million papers developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on astronomy and physics. Abstracts are freely available for most articles, and fully scanned articles may be available in Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) and Portable Document Format (PDF). Hosted papers may be from peer reviewed and/or non-peer-reviewed sources. ADS is managed by the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory.
IRAF is a collection of software written at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) geared towards the reduction of astronomical images and spectra in pixel array form. This is primarily data taken from imaging array detectors such as CCDs. It is available for all major operating systems for mainframes and desktop computers. IRAF was designed cross-platform, supporting VMS and UNIX-like operating systems. Use on Microsoft Windows was made possible by Cygwin in earlier versions, and can be today done with the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Today, it is primarily used on macOS and Linux.
The Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) is one of the national scientific research laboratories in the UK operated by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC). It began as the Rutherford High Energy Laboratory, merged with the Atlas Computer Laboratory in 1975 to create the Rutherford Lab; then in 1979 with the Appleton Laboratory to form the current laboratory.
The Millennium Run, or Millennium Simulation is a computer N-body simulation used to investigate how the distribution of matter in the Universe has evolved over time, in particular, how the observed population of galaxies was formed. It is used by scientists working in physical cosmology to compare observations with theoretical predictions.
Aladin is an interactive software sky atlas, created in France. It allows the user to visualize digitized astronomical images, superimpose entries from astronomical catalogues or databases, and interactively access related data and information from the SIMBAD database, the VizieR service and other archives for all known sources in the field.
The Starlink Project, referred to by users as Starlink and by developers as simply The Project, was a UK astronomical computing project which supplied general-purpose data reduction software. Until the late 1990s, it also supplied computing hardware and system administration personnel to UK astronomical institutes. In the former respect, it was analogous to the US IRAF project.
The Astronomical Observatory of Rome is one of twelve Astronomical Observatories in Italy. The main site of the Observatory is Monte Porzio Catone. Part of the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica since 2002.
The UCL Mullard Space Science Laboratory (MSSL) is the United Kingdom's largest university space research group. MSSL is part of the Department of Space and Climate Physics at University College London (UCL), one of the first universities in the world to conduct space research. Since its establishment, MSSL has participated in 35 satellite missions, 10 of which are currently in operation, and in over 200 sounding rocket experiments.
Astrovirtel is a data archive used as virtual astronomical observatory. The project was funded from 2000 until 2003 and supported by the European Commission's Access to Research Infrastructures action of the Improving Human Potential Programme and managed by the Space Telescope European Coordinating Facility (ST-ECF) on behalf of European Space Agency and European Southern Observatory (ESO).
The Astrophysical Virtual Observatory (AVO) project conducted a research and demonstration programme on the scientific requirements and technologies necessary to build a virtual observatory for European astronomy. The AVO has been jointly funded by the European Commission with six European organisations participating in a three-year Phase-A work programme, valued at 5 million euro. The partner organisations were the European Southern Observatory (ESO) in Munich, Germany, the European Space Agency (ESA), AstroGrid, the CNRS-supported Centre de Données Astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS), the University Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France, the CNRS-supported TERAPIX astronomical data centre at the Institut d'Astrophysique in Paris, France, and the Jodrell Bank Observatory of the Victoria University of Manchester, United Kingdom.
The International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) is a worldwide scientific organisation formed in June 2002. Its mission is to facilitate international coordination and collaboration necessary for enabling global and integrated access to data gathered by astronomical observatories. An information system allowing such an access is called a virtual observatory. The main task of the organisation so far has focused on defining standards to ensure interoperability of the different virtual observatory projects already existing or in development.
The US National Virtual Observatory'-NVO- was conceived to allow scientists to access data from multiple astronomical observatories, including ground and space-based facilities, through a single portal. Originally, the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded the information technology research that created the basic NVO infrastructure through a multi-organization collaborative effort. The NVO was more than a “digital library”; it was a vibrant, growing online research facility akin to a bricks-and-mortar observatory for professional astronomers.
The D-Grid Initiative was a government project to fund computer infrastructure for education and research (e-Science) in Germany. It uses the term grid computing. D-Grid started September 1, 2005 with six community projects and an integration project (DGI) as well as several partner projects.
The VizieR Catalogue Service is an astronomical catalog service provided by Centre de données astronomiques de Strasbourg. The origin of the service dates back to 1993, when it was founded by the European Space Agency as the European Space Information System (ESIS) Catalogue Browser. Initially intended to serve the space science community, the ESIS project pre-dates the World Wide Web as a network database allowing uniform to a heterogeneous set of catalogues and data.
WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is an open-source set of applications, data and cloud services, originally created by Microsoft Research but now an open source project hosted on GitHub. The .NET Foundation holds the copyright and the project is managed by the American Astronomical Society and has been supported by grants from the Moore Foundation and National Science Foundation. WWT displays astronomical, earth and planetary data allowing visual navigation through the 3-dimensional (3D) Universe. Users are able to navigate the sky by panning and zooming, or explore the 3D universe from the surface of Earth to past the Cosmic microwave background (CMB), viewing both visual imagery and scientific data about that area and the objects in it. Data is curated from hundreds of different data sources, but its open data nature allows users to explore any third party data that conforms to a WWT supported format. With the rich source of multi-spectral all-sky images it is possible to view the sky in many wavelengths of light. The software utilizes Microsoft's Visual Experience Engine technologies to function. WWT can also be used to visualize arbitrary or abstract data sets and time series data.
Astroinformatics is an interdisciplinary field of study involving the combination of astronomy, data science, machine learning, informatics, and information/communications technologies. The field is closely related to astrostatistics.
TOPCAT is an interactive graphical viewer and editor for tabular data. Although a general purpose tool capable of handling large and sparse datasets with correlation functionality its specialist application area is astronomy and it was initially designed to support virtual observatories. It is able to handle several digital file formats including FITS which is in common use in astronomy. The Acronym TOPCAT derives from Tool for OPerations on Catalogues And Tables.
Astropy is a collection of software packages written in the Python programming language and designed for use in astronomy. The software is a single, free, core package for astronomical utilities due to the increasingly widespread usage of Python by astronomers, and to foster interoperability between various extant Python astronomy packages. Astropy is included in several large Python distributions; it is part of package managers for Linux and macOS, the Anaconda Python Distribution, Enthought Canopy and Ureka.
