TOPCAT and STILTS release

[Mark Taylor]

Dear table enthusiasts,

This is to announce new releases of TOPCAT and STILTS.  The new releases
can be found at the usual places, and are as follows:

    TOPCAT v3.5:   http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/
    STILTS v2.1:   http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/

There are a number of new features in TOPCAT, many of them related to
Virtual Observatory facilities.  Some highlights are:

   Multi-table load:
      Multi-extension FITS files and multi-TABLE VOTable files now
      have all their tables loaded, not just the first one.

   Cone, SIA and SSA improvements:
      The Cone Search, SIA query and SSA query load windows have many
      improvements.

   Multi-Cone, multi-SIA and multi-SSA:
      New windows for multiple (per-row) cone, SIA and SSA queries.
      This effectively gives you a positional crossmatch between a
      locally loaded table and a remote one exposed by DAL services.

   VizieR access:
      A new load dialogue is available for direct access to VizieR servers.

   VOTable:
      Full VOTable 1.2 support, plus (finally) support for VOTables which
      use XML namespacing.

   SAMP:
      The "View URL as spectrum" activation action can now send spectra
      to an external spectrum via SAMP (or PLASTIC).
      The JSAMP library has been upgraded to JSAMP version 1.0.

   Memory management:
      New AdaptiveStoragePolicy - no more -disk flag!

A detailed list can be found in the version history at:

   http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/sun253/versions.html

STILTS has one main new item: the coneskymatch can now do multi-SIA
and multi-SSA as well as multi-cone search, as per the TOPCAT
capability above.

Comments, queries, bug reports all welcome.

Mark

--
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/