[News] AstroWISE status in Paris

[Emmanuel Bertin]

Dear ASTRO-WISErs

As I am not sure to assist the tele"k"on tomorrow, I would just like to indicate
that Frederic will soon start to work on the point-and-click "celestial" WWW
(cgi) interface that we discussed last year, as part of the visualisation tools.
Among other things it will allow you to:
- display a full-sky projection of a list of frames (based on their WCS
informations) with a colour-coding scheme according to some status field. Frame
boundaries will be superimposed to a low-res view of the whole sky in
equatorial, galactic and ecliptic coordinates.
- zoom in a given region of this projection using the mouse.
- select an alpha,delta coordinate or a group of frames/observations using the
mouse.
- work in several channels (filters) simultaneously.
Instead of using a direct interface to the database (which would be
implementation dependent), we propose to use a more portable interface working
with WCS parameters embedded in XML. Hence one could also make us of this CGI
anywhere on a website (simply to present a survey strategy for instance),
without having to mess with a database.
Comments are welcome.
Cheers,
					Emmanuel.