A semester-long course on the VO: materials available

[Petr Skoda]

Hi Markus,

It is excellent piece of work !  I sure will use it for some of my 
tutorials nad lectures I am sometimes giving.

But I was wondering what is there about spectra ... And exactly as I 
expected, there is almost nothing ;-)

I would like to give you some experience with VO demonstrations I give 
sometimes as a live demo after lectures or seminars ....


The most aplauded magic they learn easily, is the use case of having some 
table in topcat , somehow to preprocess it (e.g. Gaia alerts, filtered by 
magnitude) - then using multi ssa query to LAMOST DR6 to get spectra and 
then display the spectrum in SPLAT. (optionally with other trics as topcat 
movie - activation including pauses, and also diplaying picture of object 
in DSS2 in Aladin) .

I have had here at Ondrejov last week two student of the upcoming first 
and second year of gymnazium (but they are winners of international 
astronomical olympiad) and they were able to install on Mac and windows 
machines the Topcat, Aladin and splat (this after some fights with strange 
installator requests - I will report it to Margarida) And after some hour 
they could do the above magic. But they did not yet try any Python 
programming at all (I was told that  if some school is teaching 
programming for enthuziastic pupils, it is almost always, C#  (probably MS 
influence in our schools ...)



During my VO lectures for university students, once I switch to python and 
try to explain VO (pyVO) how it is flexible, the students are 
quickly loosing interest ..... Despite they have lectures about using 
Python in preparing lab excercise of physics, or photometry hans-on .....
I dont understand why they dont cope with pyVO (maybe - the VO is full of 
new terms, XML processing ,,, what is returned is also too abstract, 
And explaining the ADQL is at the higher level - no go zone ...

"Why my god you define POINTS and CIRCLES etc .... when you can do cone 
search as (coordinates, radius) in all tools (including SSA) ??" Why 1= 
???
Explaining the flexibiliy of polygons etc .... - no way ....




BTW - I do not understand why are you discriminating SPLAT and CASSIS on 
page 4 - where instead of direct links pointying to the respective web 
page (topcat, aladin etc) you just refer to the applications web of IVOA 
where are people lost immediately and going to SPLAT-VO leads them to the 
Draper's page etc ...

I would add immediate link to download the gavo SPLAT (or Cassis)
Otherwise the students get a wrong feeling that the SPLAT is something 
complicated and not core part of VO (despite the installator has some 
problems but not on Linux,
Arguing by debian packaging of some applications is IMHO misleading - many 
students are using Macs or Windows  (still).
I would encourage them to get a Big VO Threesome - TOPCAT, ALADIn, 
SPLAT-VO (from GAVO) and tell them - dont be afraid - there a multiple 
systems supported - you gen get details there ... (links)

That said, another issue I have with your text.

Page 59  Datalink ....
Not only that in printed pdf is the cartoon unreadable - I would fill the 
whole page with it, but also it is misleading....

In fact I was thinking a few minutes if it is a real example 
(phtographic plate of the same object as shown in FEROS spectra etc ....
I understand that you wanted the show various possibilities of Datalink 
semantics, but you should warn the reader that it is a mixture of 
different hypothetic examples

Generally i still feel this chapter should be written in a more detail

Also I do not see the most fancy part of datalink - the SPLAT scissors (I 
would mention it)
Obvious example - I have many spectra and I want the cutout of single line 
(Halfa) to see if it is in emission or not ...
Not talking about renormalisation .....

Having said that I admire yours (I mean all co-authors) effort and nice 
outcome !


P.S - I am now a little VO sillent, as I am not going to visit neither 
ADASS , nor IVOA - even not by Zoom ( I had to give up all this due to the 
one month trip in November - commercial travel agency organized 
sightseeing of Mexico focused on ancient Mayan civilization )
Do you know where the May 25 interop should be placed ?
I would like to return there to the roots of spectral VO services with 
some critical review and positive examples ....

Cheers,

Petr

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*  Petr Skoda                         Phone : +420-323-649201, ext. 361 *
*  Stellar Department                         +420-323-620361           *
*  Astronomical Institute CAS         Fax   : +420-323-620250           *
*  251 65 Ondrejov                    e-mail: skoda at sunstel.asu.cas.cz  *
*  Czech Republic                             skoda at asu.cas.cz          *
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