A New Way To Search, A New Way To Discover: MAST Discovery Portal Goes Live
From the post:
MAST is pleased to announce that the first release of our Discovery Portal is now available. The Discovery Portal is a one-stop web interface to access data from all of MAST’s supported missions, including HST, Kepler, GALEX, FUSE, IUE, EUVE, Swift, and XMM. Currently, users can search using resolvable target names or coordinates (RA and DEC). The returned data include preview plots of the data (images, spectra, or lightcurves), sortable columns, and advanced filtering options. An accompanying AstroViewer projects celestial sky backgrounds from DSS, GALEX, or SDSS on which to overlay footprints from your search results. A details panel allows you to see header information without downloading the file, visit external sites like interactive displays or MAST preview pages, and cross-search with the Virtual Observatory. In addition to searching MAST, users can also search the Virtual Observatory based on resolvable target names or coordinates, and download data from the VO directly through the Portal (Spitzer, 2MASS, WISE, ROSAT, etc.) You can quickly download data one row at a time, or add items to your Download Cart as you browse for download when finished, much like shopping online. Basic plotting tools allow you to visualize metadata from your search results. Users can also upload their own tables of targets (IDs and coordinates) for use within the Portal. Cross-matching can be done with all MAST data or any data available through the CDS at Strasbourg. All of these features interact with each other: you can use the charts to drag and select data points on a plot, whose footprints are highlighted in the AstroViewer and whose returned rows are brought to the top of your search results grid for further download or exploration.
Just a quick reminder that not every data mining project is concerned with recommendations of movies or mining reviews.
Seriously, astronomy has been dealing with “big data” long before it became a buzz word.
When you are looking for new techniques or insights into data exploration, check my posts under astroinformatics.