MOC note announcement

[FERNIQUE Pierre (OBS)]

Dear IVOA members,

Following the presentation during the Naples interop meeting and during the last ADASS at Paris, we prepared a short note describing our ideas about coverage maps/footprints based on HEALPix tessellation. You will find it on the IVOA site => http://www.ivoa.net/Documents/Notes/MOC/index.html

Best regards
Pierre Fernique

Title :
MOC – HEALPix Multi-Order Coverage map

Authors:
Thomas Boch, Tom Donaldson, Pierre Fernique, Wil O'Mullane, Martin Reinecke, Mark Taylor

Editor:
Pierre Fernique

Abstract:
This note describes a simple and powerful method to specify sky regions. The goal is to have a way  for providing very fast comparisons and data access methods. The principle is based on HEALPix sky tessellation. It boils down to defining a list of sky cells, grouped hierarchically. This method has been tested and validated in two tools: Aladin and Topcat, and in a front-end tool for VizieR catalogs.