The Virtual Observatory and Distributed Computing @JENAM 2009 Wednesday April 22, 2009. Significant new software systems are being deployed across Europe to meet the challenges presented by current and planned astronomical missions and research projects. This session will allow for updates on systems covering emerging Virtual Observatory systems (e.g. The EURO-VO), advanced data pipe-lining and management systems designed to support the scientific exploitation of new missions from ESA and ESO, use of distributed compute grids to support e.g. numerical simulations, and significant new astronomy applications for use on the 'desktop'.
Further, the session will highlight how astronomers can access the widest range of data and applications through the VO, via a variety of robust tools, offering a range of features.

Those with new systems, examples of research enabled by access to powerful compute infrastructures, or members from astronomy missions with challenging new requirements are encouraged to contribute to this session.
The two sessions will: a) contain invited presentations to review the availability of Virtual Observatory services (data and applications) in Europe, showcasing the leading efforts of ESO and ESA. b) allow contributed presentations demonstrating the scientific results from the use of European-VO services, including new access to survey data, generation of transient event pipelines, and so forth. c) present the availability of simulations and theoretical services through the Virtual Observatory. d) highlight the use of commercially developed systems such as Google-Sky and Microsoft's World Wide Telescope as tools for astronomers.
This session will be of interest to a wide cross section of astronomy users, from cosmologists to solar-terrestrial physicists.

CALL FOR PAPERS: Those wishing to make a contribution to this session, either as a contributed talk or poster paper are encouraged to submit their abstracts through the meeting website at http://www.jenam2009.eu/ Abstracts are submitted when registering - please select session (t) 'The Virtual Observatory and Distributed Computing'. Deadline for submission of abstracts will be: Monday 9th March, 2009.

EuroVO-AIDA School 2009 March 30 - April 2, 2009. The Virtual Observatory (VO) is opening up new ways of exploiting the huge amount of data provided by the ever-growing number of ground-based and space facilities. The goals of the School, held at ESO, in Garching near Munich, are to expose European astronomers to the variety of VO tools and services available today so that they can use them efficiently for their own research. To achieve these goals, VO experts will lecture and tutor the participants on the usage of such tools. Real life examples of scientific applications will be given, some of them selected from the science cases that participants will be asked to submit at the time of registration. A large fraction of the time will be dedicated to hands-on exercises, which will allow participants to become fully familiar with the VO capabilities.
Deadline for registration is February 15, 2009. For more details, visit the workshop's web page.

EuroVO-AIDA 1st Community Workshop December 1-3, 2008 Multi-wavelength Astronomy & the VO. The EURO-VO project, in the framework of AIDA, is organsing an international workshop at ESAC. As new and older ground-based and space facilities will continue providing multi-wavelength data in a variety of formats and multi-chip instruments and large Surveys are expected to increase the data inflow by orders of magnitude, the VO is becoming indispensable for accessing and handling the exponentially increasing data volume. The goals of the workshop are to pinpoint the challenges multi-wavelength astronomy will be facing in the coming years and to identify how the unique capabilities intrinsic to the VO concept, such as simultaneous access to different archives, metadata describing the content and quality of the data packages or tools to e.g. cross-correlate the various datasets, can meet them. To achieve these goals, the workshop will bring together experts in multi-wavelength galactic and extragalactic astronomy and scientists and engineers actively involved in the international VO initiative.
Deadline for registration is October 24 2008. For more details, visit the web page of the workshop.

New AstroGrid release Revealing the multi-wavelength sky with AstroGrid. The multi-wavelength sky is set to clear as the world's most powerful astronomical virtual observatory opens. The AstroGrid service provides the UK astronomy community unparalleled access to the wide range of multi-wavelength observations of our sky. Access to the AstroGrid service becomes available at http://www.astrogrid.org. Read more in the official press release web site.

Census of the European astronomical data centers The EURO-VO Data Centre Alliance project (http://www.euro-vo.org/pub/dca/overview.html) is a Coordination Action funded by the European Commission within the Sixth Framework Program. It aims at helping European astronomical data centres to publish their data and services in the Virtual Observatory, using standards defined by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA). EuroVO-DCA operates by coordinating the sharing of expertise, organizing Workshops, and providing assistance, in particular through the national VO projects and by technical visit of experts. The European community of Data Centres is not well identified at present. In order for the DCA to provide the best possible service to help Data Centres participate in the VO, we are conducting a census of data centres to understand their characteristics and needs. The information collected in this census will provide a snapshot of the European Data Centre Community, and will guide the preparation of workshops, tutorials and other assistance programs to help Data Centres 'publish to the VO'. European Data Centres encompass a wide diversity of data and services, and the DCA adopts a broad and inclusive definition of a Data Centre . The census questions aim to capture the basic information that characterise Data Centres in terms of their content, services and current interfaces. Additional information and the census questionnaires can be found here. Please submit your questionnaires by January 25, 2008.

AIDA: Astronomical Infrastructure for Data Access The EURO-VO proposal "Astronomical Infrastructure for Data Access (AIDA)" submitted to the first Framework Programme 7 (FP7) Infrastructure call INFRA-2007-1.2.1 "Scientific Digital Repositories" has been selected for funding at the 2.7 M€ level. The projected starting date is Feb. 1, 2008 and ensures the continuation of European-wide VO activities at least until 2010. AIDA aims at unifying the digital data collection of European astronomy, integrating their access mechanisms with evolving e-technologies and enhancing the science extracted from these data-sets.

"Astronomy with Virtual Observatories" October 15-19, 2007 The workshop will provide an overview of importnat technical aspects of the Virtual Observatory, various tools and services developed in the VO framework, large data archives, and specific case studies which highlight the ise of VO resources and tools to obtain new scientific results".

"Our non-stable Universe" August 20-25, 2007 Joint European and National Astronomy Meeting organized jointly by the European Astronomical Society and the Armenian Astronomical Society.
This meeting will include a session on "Science with Virtual Observatories".
Meeting Page      VO Session 

Workshop: publishing data in the VO June 25-29, 2007 The workshop is geared towards data centres and large projects to acquire the knowledge and experience necessary to allow them to become "publishers" in the VO. In tutorials and hands-on sessions, participants will be introduced to VO protocols in the view of publishing their data holdings through the VO.

EURO-VO Spectroscopy Workshop March 21-23, 2007 The goal of this EURO-VO workshop held at the European Space Astronomy Centre (ESAC) in Spain is to outline needs and challenges that astronomical spectroscopy will be facing in the coming years, and to identify how the unique capabilities intrinsic to the Virtual Observatory concept can meet them.

EURO-VO Research Initiative 13 February, 2007 The EURO-VO project is soliciting proposals from teams aiming at carrying out astronomical projects driven by the Virtual Observatory concept, and making use of the Virtual Observatory tools and applications. The successful groups will receive support from EURO-VO astronomers to complete their projects by December 2007.
Call for Proposals     Submission Form 

VO Special Session at the IAU General Assembly August 17-22, 2006 A Virtual Observatory Special Session will be held at the IAU General Assembly in Prague: "The Virtual Observatory in Action: New Science, New Technology, and Next Generation Facilities"    
Meeting Page ⇒     Call for papers

First EURO-VO Science Advisory Committe meeting April 27-28, 2006 The first meeting of the EURO-VO Science Advisory Committe (SAC) will be held at ESO, Garching. The EURO-VO SAC is composed of leading European esearchers outside mainstream VO projects and its task is to provide scientific advice to the EURO-VO Project.

EURO-VO Data Centre Alliance to receive EU funding December 2005 A proposal submitted for funding of the EURO-VO Data Centre Alliance (DCA) to the Sixth Framework Project (FP6; Coordination Actions) of the European Community has been accepted. The ~ 1.5 M€ funding will allow eight European astronomical organizations to set-up the uptake of the VO framework by the European data centres. This is vital for the EURO-VO goal of making the VO a reality in Europe.

EURO-VO Workshop 2005 27 June - 1 July, 2005 The EURO-VO Project held a workshop on VO technologies and standards explicitly designed for data centres and large projects to acquire the knowledge and experience necessary to allow them to become publishers in the VO. There were 120 participants, affiliated with 47 institutions in 16 countries and representatives of 11 IVOA member projects.

AVO Demo 2005 ⇒ January 25-26, 2005 The final demo of the AVO project - "Toward the EuroVO" - has been held at ESAC, Villafranca del Castillo, Spain. The demo showcased new workflow techniques and focus on two scientific scenarios, i.e., the evolution of AGB stars to Planetary Nebulae and Star Formation Histories in Galaxies.

First VO Paper May 28, 2004 The first major discovery to be made with the Virtual Observatory was announced today to the press. The AVO science team discovered 31 previously undetected powerful supermassive black holes in the so-called GOODS (Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey) fields. The paper describing these results was published in Astronomy & Astrophysics 424, p. 545.

'Super-starburst' galaxies hide active black holes ⇒ April 5, 2005 A team of European scientists has used Virtual Observatories to compare observations of distant "starburst" galaxies made at radio and X-ray wavelengths. This is the first study to combine the highest resolution and sensitivity radio and X-ray images which penetrate the dust hiding the centres of some of these distant galaxies.

What is a Virtual Observatory? – An Overview The Virtual Observatory can streamline the once cumbersome process of searching for and collating astronomical data and bring together information to create a whole greater than the sum of its parts.