The VO at WFAU

These pages provide a current list of all the Virtual Observatory services hosted by the Wide Field Astronomy Unit at the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Edinburgh.  The services are grouped according to their purpose/capabilities.  Basic information about each service is also provided, including: Title, IVO Identifier, link to the service's registry information, and a description of the service.  This site is simply for providing information and there are no direct links to access the services.  Use the links at the left to view the information about the different services on offer.

Our VO services allow users to access both data and applications hosted by WFAU through a consistent set of interfaces.  These interfaces, once learned, are more flexible and powerful tools for obtaining data than standard website interfaces.  They can be harnessed programmatically through scripts and workflows to automate complex data collection and processing, or they can be browsed and explored through user software like VODesktop for feature rich interactive use.  The services are IVOA compliant and therefore can be accessed using the same set of tools and methods as other VO services from around the world.  We host several different categories of services, including: data access (image and catalogue), data processing, and VO infrastructure.  Our main speciality is in data services, where we provide access to several unique datasets curated and hosted at our data centre as well as mirrors of popular datasets developed elsewhere.

The majority of these services are implementations of the suite of AstroGrid developed service components.  The exceptions are our SIAP services which were built using the DAL Toolkit from the European Space Agency VO group, or developed in house by our software developers.  Details about the AstroGrid project and the different software it has developed can be found on their website. 

WFAU, Institute for Astronomy,
Royal Observatory, Blackford Hill
Edinburgh, EH9 3HJ, UK
Tel +44 131 668 8356 (office)
or +44 131 668 8100 (switchboard)