VO-IRAF Preview Demo

[fitz]

I had to prepare a canned demo of some of the VO/IRAF work I've been doing and thought it might be of interest to people here as well. This was presented at this year's NVO Summer School and most recently at ADASS and is nearing completion for a public release. The demo is about 11min and available as

http://iraf.net/ftp/pub/fitz/IRAF_VO_Demo.mov

(66Mb Quicktime movie).

So what does this mean for you? It means that all of SDSS, 2MASS, HST, Chandra, USNO-B, DSS, NED and literally thousands of other data archives and catalogs are accessible from within IRAF. The image you took last night can be compared easily with an Keck or Gemini image of the same field (if it exists), you can also look at that field in the IR or X-ray just as easily. The trick is to develop new science applications that can use VO data alongside the FITS image on your laptop. The best part is, this can all be done through scripts, no SPP coding is required.

Any feedback (on the software, not the quality of the movie) is welcome. Suggestions for new tasks and what to do with all that VO data are also welcome.

-Mike