Stellarium/VirGO, an open source visual archive browser

Chéreau Fabien

Virtual Observatory Department, European Organisation for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere (ESO), Karl-Schwarzschild-Strasse 2 D-85748 Garching bei München, Germany, e-mail: fchereau@eso.org

The current tendency of the general public to use proprietary softwares (Google Sky, Microsoft WWT) for displaying private copies of data originally created by publicly-funded institutions does not go in the direction of the global objective of increasing the openness of access to astronomical data. In this presentation, we introduce the open-source planetarium and archive browser Stellarium/VirGO and investigate what are the technical and political issues to address in order to place it as a serious alternative to other commercial solutions.

VirGO is the next generation Visual Browser for the ESO Science Archive Facility developed by the VO Systems Department. It is a plug-in for the popular open source software Stellarium with added capabilities for browsing professional astronomical data. VirGO gives astronomers the possibility to easily discover and select data from millions of observations in a new visual and intuitive way. Its main feature is to perform real-time access and graphical display of a large number of observations by showing instrumental footprints and image previews, and to allow their selection and filtering for subsequent retrieval. It reads FITS images and catalogs in VOTable format. It superimposes DSS background images and allows to view the sky in a real life mode as seen from the main ESO sites. Data interfaces are based on Virtual Observatory standards enabling access to images and spectra hosted by other data centers and to exchange data with other VO applications through the PLASTIC messaging system.