ANCHORS (AN archive of CHandra Observations of Regions of Star formation) is a 3 year old Chandra archival project. The archive is intended to aid both the X-ray astronomer with a desire to compare X-ray datasets and the star formation astronomer wishing to compare stars across the spectrum. The database currently contains all publicly available observations; about 70 observations and 15,000 point sources. We use UNIX shell scripts, Perl, and standard X-ray analysis tools (CIAO) to uniformly process each observation through a pipeline including source detection, photometry, spectral analysis, temporal (light curve) analysis, and 2MASS cross-matching. Final data products are stored in XML format and are ingested into a mySQL database. The website is currently XML driven and fairly static with access only cluster by cluster and no search or retrieval capability.

The goals of this NVOSS06 project are to:
1) develop an SQL-driven interface using PHP or Java or ???
2) provide user queries to select sources from individual clusters and across the entire database. Queries include conesearch and searches on source properties.
3) return VOTables of selected sources, including development of appropriate UCDs and Schema.

help wanted: PHP/Java developers, scientific input of desired queries and useful output.

Secondary goals:
1) perform VO registry queries to identify multi-wavelength cross-matches and references. 2) develop UCDs and Schema for intermediate XML docs.

Ultimate ambition goal: convert CGI/POST/GET queries to a more sophisticated web service style.

We expect to be ready for VO registration in December 2006.

If you are interested in helping with any of these tasks or have any other ideas please let me know. bspitzbart@cfa.harvard.edu

-- BradSpitzbart - 09 Sep 2006

Cone search exercise

UCD Builder
UCD tree builder
local SkyNode