1.1 HOW-TO DBViewer: Plotting and Accessing (External) Image- and Source-catalogs

1.1.1 DBviewer interacting with VO-applets for visualization

Next to providing downloaded data to resident programs, the DB viewer supports features to interact with astronomical programs imported as web-applets. To use an Aladin-sky atlas-java-applet for FITS-images and sourcelist-data, the DBviewer can present a choice of links to call Aladin and have it import FITS-image or VO-xml source data, or both in parallel. The http://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/Aladin applet can access a large number external catalogs and do a number of operations, including interactive plotting. In addition, it can access the client machine directly and import VO-xml or FITS data exported from the viewer.

To have the DBviewer submit data to the graphical table viewer-applet http://andromeda.star.bris.ac.uk/ mbt/topcat/TOPCAT, download tabular data from the viewer in VO-xml format. Call TOPCAT from its remote server by means of a preconfigured entry in the java-webstart manager on the clients machine to access a table. TOPCAT has statistical and interactive (regression) plotting abilities, and some form of access to a few catalogs.

1.1.2 DBviewer exporting data to resident image browsers

FITS images from any table of the database can be loaded via the clients machine into astronomical Image Browsers. Activate the HTML-links to FITS files in DBviewer and download via the web browser dialog menu. NB: Astro-WISE FITS-images may be large (> 500 Mb), and in a compressed format. Links to programs:

• http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/ftools/fv/Fv: software tool for viewing and editing any FITS format image or table
• http://hea-www.harvard.edu/RD/ds9/DS9: astronomical image and data visualization application
• http://archive.eso.org/skycat/Skycat: astronomical image and catalog browser