SkyView Blog

I’ve been at the International Virtual Observatory Alliance meeting in Trieste Italy this week. SkyView has had a bit of visibility here. The WorldWideTelescope use of SkyView surveys was prominently mentioned in Jonathan Fay’s presentation on the WWT, and SkyView was also prominent in the Virtual Observatory Integration and Mining (VIM) software developed at Caltech that was discussed by Roy Williams.

SkyView both uses and supports the Virtual Observatory. Users can get data from SkyView using the VO’s Simple Image Access Protocol (SIAP). SkyView gets information for catalog overlays using the VO Cone Search. If you would like to set up an SIAP, the SkyView distribution provides support for this too.

The release of Microsoft’s WorldWideTelescope this week made a big splash with articles in the New York Times and other media. It’s a very nice interface where you can just zoom and pan and compare data in a very elegant fashion. The ability to build tours of the sky is amazing.

When they look inside the hood of the WWT, SkyView users may find a lot of stuff that looks familiar. Most of the survey images in the initial release of WWT were taken from SkyView. The TOAST projection was added to SkyView to help support the WWT’s ingest of many of our most popular surveys.

We are very pleased to have been able to play a role in the WWT. We anticipate closer integration of SkyView and this kind of interface (WWT, GoogleSky, sky-map.org) in the future. The unprecedented ability to rapidly browse the entire survey nicely complements SkyView’s ability to create precisely tailored images. SkyView’s role as an archive for multi-wavelength survey data remains unparalleled and should be strengthened with the release of our publication interface.

Congratulations to the WWT team.