SkyView Blog

We are working on the capability to enable users to incorporate their own data into SkyView to take advantage of the geometry engine and image processing tools that SkyView offers. User data can be shared in the SkyView-In-A-Jar application and be included on the SKyView Query Form or the user may choose to keep the data private.

The current iteration of the user interface is below. Users have the option to create a new survey or edit a previously submitted survey. At this time data uploaded must be FITS files or compressed archives of FITS files. The simplest upload requires only the survey name and a listing of the files. More survey details can be added in the Optional Information and the Metadata Information sections.

Once a survey has been uploaded and auto-validated users will be able to see their data immediately in SkyView or later by logging in again. If the user has chosen to make the survey public it will appear on the general Query Form after being checked by SkyView staff.

This new feature should be available sometime this summer.

This afternoon we released the new Jar version 2.4b of SkyView. The changes are predominantly internal and are described in a previous post. However, there is one change that affects the SkyView web site. An old feature from the pre-java version of SkyView is returning. When Catalog Overlays are selected in the Query Form a link to the source listing is currently displayed with each SkyView image. Now there is also a link to the HEASARC Browse query used to obtain the listing providing much more data about each source. Note that HEASARC Browse uses a cone search that may return more catalog sources than would appear on the SkyView image.

The current SkyView JAR files were compiled using Java 1.5. We’re likely to move to 1.6 in the next release unless we hear an outcry from our users. It should be a little faster but if you just download the JAR file and use it on your machine you will need to have 1.6 installed. We’ll add a link to a 1.5 version, but we’ll likely stop updating that in a release or two.

Unless you’re interested in the SkyView internals you probably don’t need to read this one!

None of the changes discussed below will affect how SkyView is called or what it does. If you have been building your own version of SkyView classes or using SkyView Java classes in other applications you may want check to see if this will affect you.

One of the main design goals of the Java-based implementation of SkyView is to enable new capabilities by dynamically loading the major components of the system. So the projections, samplers, and such are all loaded based upon default names or settings the user has specified. Recently I’ve begun rationalizing this, so that the same scheme is used everywhere. Currently in some cases you specify the entire class name (e.g., skyview.process.imagefinder.Exposure). In others you specify a part of the name and it builds up the class, e.g., projection=Ait means load the class skyview.geometry.project.AitProjecter. In still others you can specify the class name and it will look both within a default package and for the class name exactly as you specified it.

In the next release all of these will use this last approach to create the class, calling the method:

Object x  = skyview.util.Utilities.newInstance(String name, String pkg)

This method first looks for the class with the package name prepended to the class and then for the class name alone. Each type of object (projecters, samplers imagefinders, …) has a ‘default’ package, or the user can put them in any package and give the fully qualified class name as the appropriate setting.

The effect of this is that the names of some of the low level classes in SkyView will change. The class skyview.geometry.projecter.AitProjecter becomes skyview.geometry.projecter.Ait. Similarly skyview.geometry.sampler.ClipSampler becomes skyview.geometry.sampler.Clip. The functionality of these classes is unchanged. This eliminates some redundancy from the class names, allows a more uniform handling of errors in the loading of classes, and allows shorter setting values in some cases.

Please let us know if you have questions or concerns about this upcoming change.