Indian Astronomers Around the World

Mark Taylor is the author of the TOPCAT application. His PhD and initial research were in computational condensed matter physics, but since late last century he has been working on astronomy software, in particular developing TOPCAT and related packages, and acting within the framework of the international Virtual Observatory to define and implement protocols for access to distributed astronomy data. Most of this work has been done at the University of Bristol in the UK.

Modern astronomical observations produce large amounts of data, much of it in the form of source catalogues and other tables. TOPCAT is an interactive desktop application, developed over the last two decades, that helps astronomers to work with these products. It facilitates operations such as data access, visualisation, selection management, calculations and crossmatching so that astronomers can concentrate on the scientific meaning of the observations rather than the mechanics of moving data around. It has particular strengths in interactive exploration of large and small datasets and in providing access to external data via the Virtual Observatory.

In the first part of the presentation I will describe the main aims and capabilities of the software. In the second part I will run through some live demonstrations of using it for science analysis of data from the Gaia source catalogue. Participants can either just watch the demos or follow along as a hands-on exercise. A detailed script describing how to reproduce the demonstrations is provided for use either at the time or for later reference. There will be time for questions and discussion.