The 2011-2012 Annual Report of the Astronomy & Astrophysics Advisory Committee (AAAC) included positive mention of the VAO’s role in astronomical data management, distribution, and access. The AAAC encourages coordination among the VAO, major U.S. astronomical survey teams, and national observatories to ensure the curation, distribution, and access to legacy astronomical datasets and the development of common standards, pipelines and tools that will enable their full use for scientific research, education and outreach.

The AAAC advises the National Science Foundation (NSF), the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) on selected issues within the fields of astronomy and astrophysics that are of mutual interest and concern to the agencies. The full report of the AAAC can be read here.

Alex Szalay, VAO Technology Adviser, will be participating in a multi-agency panel entitled “Challenges and Opportunities in Big Data”.

Researchers in a growing number of fields are generating extremely large and complicated data sets, commonly referred to as “big data.” A wealth of information may be found within these sets, with enormous potential to shed light on some of the most pressing challenges facing the nation. To capitalize on this unprecedented opportunity -— to extract insights, discover new patterns, and make new connections across disciplines —- we need better tools to access, store, search, visualize, and analyze these data.

At this webcast event, federal government science heads from OSTP, NSF, NIH, DOE, DOD, DARPA and USGS will outline how their agencies are engaged in Big Data research, followed by a panel of thought leaders from academia and industry, moderated by Steve Lohr of the New York Times.

March 29, 2012, from 2:00 pm to 3:30 pm ET
Join via webcast at http://live.science360.gov/bigdata/
More information: PDF Flyer

Astronomy Computing Today blog post about the VAO community day recently held in Tucson, AZ.

The author of Astronomy Computing Today is Bruce Berriman, an astronomer and computer scientist at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center, California Institute of Technology. He is also the Program Director of the VAO.

The Wide Field Infrared Survey (WISE) has released All-Sky catalog and image data sets. The image discovery and mosaic services make use of VOInventory, an indexing scheme optimized for fast access to large image data sets. VOInventory, developed by the VAO, also underpins the Spitzer Space Telescope Heritage Archive.  The WISE mosaic service uses the Montage image mosaic engine, built specifically for the Virtual Observatory.

You can read more about the catalog release in the NASA JPL press release.

Please join us for our VO Community Day at Steward Observatory!

Tools for Data-Intensive Astronomy
a VO Community Day at the Steward Observatory/University of Arizona

Tuesday March 13, 2012
9:00AM - 11:50AM
Location: Steward Observatory Lecture Hall (N210) - University of Arizona.

The Virtual Observatory (VO) is realizing global electronic integration of astronomy data, tools, and services for use by individuals around the world. This new environment of interoperability will facilitate astronomy research with a speed, efficiency, and effectiveness not previously possible, and it will be available to all researchers, independent of their affiliation or access to observing facilities.

During this “VO Day”, aimed at research astronomers, VO experts from the Virtual Astronomical Observatory (VAO) - one of many VO projects worldwide - will demonstrate new tools and services for data-intensive astronomy in the context of a range of science use cases and tutorials. These use cases and tutorials, based on recent results from the literature and on-going missions, will include:

* constructing and modeling spectral energy distributions
* cross-matching objects from diverse catalogs
* exploration of time series data
* image analysis tools
* advanced discovery tools for images, tables, and literature.

This workshop is organized and sponsored by the US Virtual Astronomical Observatory. The workshop is open to anyone interested, and there is no registration fee. Registration, however, is required. Please visit

http://www.usvao.org/voday@tucson

for registration and further information, including maps & directions.

There is also a printable poster for this workshop: http://www.usvao.org/voday@tucson/VODay@Tucson.pdf. We would be grateful if you would print and post it in your department. Thank you, and hope to see you on March 13.

If you have any questions, please contact:

Betty Stobie
bstobie@noao.edu
(520) 318-8390

A special session on Data Intensive Astronomy will be held during the General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union in Beijing (August 2012).  Participants are invited to register and submit abstract(s) through the IAU XXVIII General Assembly web site.

Session Description: The rapid development of semiconductor technology has lead to large sensitive detectors that enabled astronomers to easily survey large sky areas. Such large-scale observations and surveys cover a wide range of scientific themes in astronomy. Astronomers need to be well-prepared for such a new era of astronomical research utilizing large amounts of data. Since the data production rate will be 100 to 1000 times larger than the past, advanced data analyses combined with statistics and data mining will be essential to derive general “rules” and/or “knowledge” on various phenomena in the Universe, as the data volumes will make human inspection and analysis of the data impossible. The most important and exciting astronomical discoveries of the coming decade will rely on research and development in data science disciplines that enable rapid information extraction, knowledge discovery, and others, combined with sophisticated data management, access, visualization and other technical advancement.

Topics include:

• Near- and far-future telescopes and survey projects that will produce large-scale data
• Scientific insights from large-scale observations in broad fields in astronomy
• Advanced data analyses, such as data mining, in deriving scientific knowledge from large-scale data
• Data management and data access with and beyond virtual observatories to ensure data-intensive astronomical research
• Synergy of data-intensive astronomy with other fields, such as mathematics/statistics and informatics
• Education, Public Outreach and Others

More information about Special Session 15 : Data Intensive Astronomy can be found at http://www.adc.nao.ac.jp/SpS15/

Proposals due:  1 March 2012

The US Virtual Astronomical Observatory (VAO) seeks proposals from the astronomical research community for science collaborations that utilize virtual observatory capabilities or develop novel virtual observatory tools to produce new re-search results.  Proposals may be in any area of astronomy, but projects that benefit from the integration of data in multiple wavelength regions, that involve analysis of time-domain data sets, and/or utilize large databases or data sets are the most germane to the VAO. The VAO cannot directly fund these collaborations, but will provide in-kind support in using and adapting VO technologies in the selected projects.  Such support may include VAO technical staff visiting a research team or covering travel costs for members of a research team to visit a VAO organization.  Ongoing support will be in the form of telecons, e-meetings (e.g. WebEx), a Wiki site, or other online collaborative tools.

If you have a research project or research tool that you think would benefit from easy access to the diverse data archives, catalogs, and databases that are available through the virtual observatory, we would like to hear from you!  We ask that you submit a brief proposal (2-3 pages) describing the project you have in mind and indicating what level of effort you are able to devote to the project.  The VAO Science Council will assist the VAO project in selecting those proposals that are the most complementary to the goals of the VAO and having the highest likelihood of success, either in terms of new science results or new products (advanced data products, software tools) of benefit to the astronomical community.

Please submit proposals to director@usvao.org by 1 March 2012. Results will be communicated by e-mail to all applicants by 1 May 2012.

VO-related Publication: “Identification of red high proper-motion objects in Tycho-2 and 2MASS catalogues using Virtual Observatory tools”

Authors: F. M. Jiménez-Esteban, J. A. Caballero, R. Dorda, P. A. Miles-Páez, E. Solano

Accepted in Astronomy & Astrophysics
http://arxiv.org/abs/1201.5315

Abstract: Aims: With available Virtual Observatory tools, we looked for new M dwarfs in the solar neighbourhood and M giants with high tangential velocities. Methods: From an all-sky cross-match between the optical Tycho-2 and the near-infrared 2MASS catalogues, we selected objects with proper motions >50mas/yr and very red V-Ks colours. For the most interesting targets, we collected multi-wavelength photometry, constructed spectral energy distributions, estimated effective temperatures and surface gravities from fits to atmospheric models, performed time-series analysis of ASAS V-band light curves, and assigned spectral types from low-resolution spectroscopy obtained with CAFOS at the 2.2m Calar Alto telescope. Results: We got a sample of 59 bright red high proper-motion objects, including fifty red giants, four red dwarfs, and five objects reported in this work for the first time. The five new stars have magnitudes V~10.8-11.3mag, reduced proper motions midway between known dwarfs and giants, near-infrared colours typical of giants, and effective temperatures Teff~2900-3400K. From our time-series analysis, we discovered a long secondary period in Ruber 4 and an extremely long primary period in Ruber 6. With the CAFOS spectra, we confirmed the red giant nature of Ruber 7 and 8, the last of which seems to be one of the brightest metal-poor M giants ever identified.