VOEvent streams available

[Alasdair Allan]

All,

With the SDSS event notices now appearing on the Caltech TCP backbone  
I thought it was time to send a quick update message to the list to  
remind them about the client side resources now available via eSTAR  
and, of course, how you can subscribe to event messages.

You can subscribe to messages either via TCP or RSS. However all the  
incoming messages are archived and made available via the eSTAR  
website, or for Apple Mac OSX users, via a Dashboard Widget.

1) Vanilla TCP

The eSTAR project publishes event messages in real time through a TCP  
server which you can connect up to very simply. A sample client is  
available on the eSTAR web site at

    http://www.estar.org.uk/wiki/index.php/ESTAR_Event_Broker

and the TCP server is available on,

vo.astro.ex.ac.uk

on port,

8099

to which you can connect. I'd appreciate an email if you intend to  
connect to the server on a long term basis.

This is a "hose pipe" feed as you are connecting directly onto a  
backbone node. You should receive all messages currently moving over  
the event network, including; OGLE EWS Microlensing events, SDSS  
Supernova candidates, TALONS messages and at two (different)  
translations of the GCN Gamma-ray Burst message traffic. Event  
messages from the ESSENCE project will be added within a couple of  
weeks, and early next year microlensing follow-up messages from the  
PLANET and Robonet-1.0 projects will start being distributed outside  
of the eSTAR network and be added to this feed.

2) RSS

If near real time is "good enough", then you also have the option to  
subscribe to event messages via RSS. You can subscribe to these as  
normal using your news aggregator. However if you do not already use  
a news aggregator, there are many freely available clients that you  
can use to read the RSS feeds, and numerous different convenience  
libraries around to let your grab the feeds programatically in your  
language of choice.

There are several RSS feeds available from the eSTAR broker, these  
are currently broken down by the original publisher;

eSTAR native
Including native messages and OGLE microlensing event messages
http://www.estar.org.uk/voevent/eSTAR/eSTAR.rdf

RAPTOR/TALONS
Including native messages, and a translation of the GCN
http://www.estar.org.uk/voevent/RAPTOR/RAPTOR.rdf

Caltech
Including SDSS messages, and a translation of the GCN
http://www.estar.org.uk/voevent/Caltech/Caltech.rdf

a separate feed for the NOAO will come online within a couple of  
weeks as ESSENCE messages begin to be distributed over the network.  
An external Robonet-1.0 feed will also be created early next year.

3) Website

All messages are archived as they flow through the eSTAR event broker  
in Exeter, as part of our work on event visualisation we have  
provided timeline interfaces for the OGLE and SDSS message traffic.  
These are available at

OGLE
http://vo.astro.ex.ac.uk/ogle/cgi-bin/timeline.cgi

SDSS
http://vo.astro.ex.ac.uk/sdss/cgi-bin/timeline.cgi

At the top of each page is an event timeline, which has two  
independently scrollable bars (the upper in days, the lower in  
months), which can be panned by clicking and dragging to show  
previous events. The currently visible view in the upper scrollable  
area is represented by a light grey box on the lower area. Each event  
is represented by a marker, labelled with the event name, and  
clicking on the marker will bring up additional data and links for  
that event. The event data is also displayed normally in table form  
below the timeline interface.

4) Dashboard Widget

Recently the eSTAR project has been experimenting (playing?) with  
AJAX interfaces, and as a result has produced a number of OSX  
Dashboard Widgets. These can be downloaded from,

http://www.estar.org.uk/wiki/index.php/Downloads

Amongst these is a widget-ised version of the OGLE Timeline page, see

http://www.estar.org.uk/wiki/index.php/Downloads#OGLE_Timeline_Widget

which you can download and install if you are running Mac OSX Tiger.  
Some time over the next couple of weeks the functionality of this  
widget will get expanded so that you can view (and possibly compare)  
the other event streams (e.g. SDSS, GCN) offered on the event network.

Cheers,
Al.
-- 
Dr. A. Allan, School of Physics, University of Exeter
eSTAR Project, http://www.estar.org.uk/

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.ivoa.net/pipermail/voevent/attachments/20061101/df4ca350/attachment-0001.html>