Using the scatter plot you can quickly plot up the data, select out a subset that looks interesting and examine it further. Take for example a table of candidates you’ve extracted from an archive. Without an internet connection Topcat is also a useful tool for basic data manipulation and vetting.
#TOPCAT ASTRONOMY MAC#
It’s a Java application which I’ve run on both my Mac desktop and Ubuntu laptop without any issues. While it can be used with other VO tools, I use it as a stand-alone application because it can do everything I want it to do on its own. Topcat was developed by Mark Taylor at Bristol as part of the UK’s VO program ( Astrogrid). Want to quickly eyeball a couple of candidates? The activation actions can be used to bring up finders from 2MASS, SuperCOSMOS or SDSS. There is also a spectroscopic database to query against. Want to check your candidates against the literature? Just search for any data table in Vizier and cross reference with it. Take for example large surveys like 2MASS and SDSS, these can be queried from the cone search (if you want all the objects in a particular area) or the multiple cone search (for extracting photometry for a list of objects). There’s a huge amount of astronomical data on the web and Topcat can give you easy access to a big chunk of it.
#TOPCAT ASTRONOMY CODE#
If you are drowning in search windows from different data archives and wasting time writing code to plot graphs of the simplest datasets then maybe it’s time to look at Topcat, a nifty little Java application to make life easier. Niall also blogs about astronomy at weareallinthegutter. This is a guest post-featuring our first screencast!-from Niall Deacon who studies brown dwarfs and white dwarfs in the Pan-STARRS survey at the University of Hawai`i.
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