TOPCAT v4.2 release

[Mark Taylor]

Hi all,

this is to announce the following releases:

   TOPCAT v4.2     http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/
   STILTS v2.5-3   http://www.starlink.ac.uk/stilts/

Highlights:

 - The main new item is access to CDS's excellent X-Match service
   (web form access to this service is at http://cdsxmatch.u-strasbg.fr/).
   TOPCAT provides a new dialogue window (available from the main toolbar)
   and STILTS the new cdsskymatch command, which allow you to take
   a local table and do a positional crossmatch against any VizieR
   table or SIMBAD.  The functionality is similar to the existing
   Multi-Cone/coneskymatch capability, but the performance is not -
   using the X-Match service is typically *three* orders of magnitude
   faster - I'm seeing several thousand rows matched a second.
   Obviously, the real work is being done here by CDS, not TOPCAT;
   if you use it, please consider acknowledging the service as described
   at http://cdsxmatch.u-strasbg.fr/xmatch/doc/xmatch-ack.html.

   Unless you have specialised requirements (non-VizieR tables,
   matches against SIA/SSA services, match radius>2arcmin),
   you should not be using multi-cone any more.
   Even if you do have specialised requirements, consider TAP instead.
   To emphasise that last point, the TAP button is now on the main toolbar
   (replacing the Concatenate button, now relegated to the Joins menu).

 - Registry access is now done by default using the RegTAP protocol.
   If you're not a registry enthusiast you don't need to worry about
   what that means, but registry searches are now much faster and
   more reliable than before.

 - By popular demand, the "frame"-style zooming familiar from
   the old-style (v3) plotting windows is now available in the
   new-style (v4) plots - drag with middle mouse button or shift key.
   Thanks to those people who bugged me about it, they were right.

Much more detail on changes is available in the version history for
the two packages:

   TOPCAT: http://www.star.bristol.ac.uk/~mbt/topcat/sun253/versions.html
   STILTS: http://www.star.bristol.ac.uk/~mbt/stilts/sun256/versions.html

Apologies for all the things I've said I'd do which are not in this
release - they're still on the list.

Thank you for your continued support.  Thanks also to those people
who have acknowleged TOPCAT/STILTS in their published work.  To those
who haven't, but would like to, you can find the references here:

   http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/faq.html#acknowledgement

Bug reports, queries, comments, suggestions etc always welcome to me
or (generally preferred) the topcat-user at bristol.ac.uk list.

Mark

--
Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University, UK
m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-9288776  http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/