First release of Footprint Services

[Colin Aspin]

Hi Tamas,

This is excellent!   However, I did put in a galactic source "V1647  
Ori" in the "Object Coverage Search" and was told that NED service  
returned an error.   You need to use SIMBAD for non-extragalactic  
sources.

cheers,
colin

On Oct 24, 2006, at 5:19 AM, Tamas Budavari wrote:

>
> Hi Everyone,
>
> We are happy to announce the first release of Footprint Services  
> for the
> Virtual Observatory. In case you missed the ADASS in Tucson last week,
> below please find the abstract of the talk that introduced the new  
> portal
> at
> 	http://www.voservices.net/footprint/
>
> I am delighted to see that our recently published online repository is
> being used as intended and people have already started submitting  
> the sky
> coverages of various surveys. Thank you! The list now includes SDSS,
> GALEX, UKIDSS, CFHTLS and more. Enjoy!
>
> We'll keep improving the site, the web services and the content  
> over time
> and we hope you all will find it useful. Feedbacks, as usual, are  
> welcome!
>
> Cheers, T.
> ___
>
> (O4a.1) Footprint Services for Everyone
> 	Tamas Budavari (The Johns Hopkins University)
> 	Laszlo Dobos (Eotvos Lorand University)
> 	Alex Szalay (The Johns Hopkins University)
> 	Gretchen Greene (Space Telescope Science Institute)
> 	Jim Gray (Microsoft Research)
> 	Arnold Rots (Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics )
>
> There is much more to astronomical observations than just source  
> catalogs.
> For example, when working with multiple observations at different
> wavelengths, knowing their precise coverages is just as important,  
> e.g. to
> look for dropouts, and can be very difficult in case of the most
> significant observations that are often the most complex, as well.  
> This
> functionality has been missing almost entirely from the toolbox of  
> many
> astronomers until today.
>
> We present high-level user and Web services for dealing with  
> astronomical
> survey geometry of arbitrary complexity. Based on our high-performance
> spherical library, we built an online public repository of footprints
> preloaded with the coverage of some of the most widely used  
> datasets today
> including the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the Galaxy Evolution
> Explorer (GALEX) and the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) exposures. We
> publish a Web based toolkit that enables advanced spatial searches for
> regions of interest on the sky, Boolean operations on selected  
> footprints
> (union, intersection), on-the-fly visualization, and exact area
> computation. We also provide an easy-to-use interactive footprint  
> editor,
> as well as a simple upload facility. The results of the searches and
> region manipulations can be saved and published on the footprint  
> server or
> downloaded in various formats including ASCII and the VO compliant
> Space-Time Coordinate (STC) region representation.
> ___
>
> Tamas Budavari
>
> Dept. of Physics and Astronomy
> The Johns Hopkins University
> 3400 N. Charles Street
> Baltimore, MD 21218
> Phone: +1 (410) 516-0643
> Fax: +1 (410) 516-5096
> http://www.sdss.jhu.edu/~budavari
>