The Virtual Observatory (VO) interface runs on a window that looks like this:
This window is invoked from Specview’s main File menu (Sec. 1.1).
The window gives access to a number of controls:
The VO interface allows the search of VO servers for spectrogram data. Servers that support the Simple Spectrum Access Protocol (SSAP) VO standard are loaded or found out automatically by the interface.
The search is specified by a cone format, where the user supplies de center coordinates and radius of a region in the sky. The interface then sends queries to all SSAP servers previously found, and waits for the servers to return lists of available spectrograms. The lists are displayed in the tabbed panels at the bottom of the window.
The user then can select the desired spectrograms and ask the interface to download them. Each spectrogram that is successfully downloaded is stored in Specview’s memory buffer (Sec. 1.3).
The following paragraphs cover each one of these operations in detail.
When the VO interface is first invoked, it automatically queries the NVO registry for its holdings of SSAP server links. The Registry menu allows the selection of alternate lists gathered from other VO registry sites. Once a registry site is selected from the menu, it is automatically queried. The links, if found, are returned to the interface and are used to populate the Servers.
For testing purposes, the registry menu also includes an internal list with a few known SSAP servers. By selecting that list, the registry query step is bypassed altogether.
Coordinates to perform the search can be input directly in the appropriate fields, but if one is interested in a single astronomical object, a name resolver can be queried to resolve the object’s name into an appropriate set of coordinates.
Just type the object name in the Name field, and hit the Resolve button (or just hit the Enter or Return key on the keyboard). The selected name resolver will be queried, and the result of the query will be placed in the coordinate fields.
Alternate name resolvers can be selected with the Resolver: selector.
Object coordinates and the region radius must be entered in the appropriate fields. The RA and DEC fields accept both decimal and sexagesimal notation.
Additional parameters can also be specified to further restrict the search region. Note that most VO servers currently will ignore these parameters. Currently the BAND and TIME attributes in a VO query can be added to the basic search criteria. Values typed in these fields must conform to whatever rules (units, spelling) are currently defined for VO queries.
Once coordinates and radius are in place, hit the Search button to begin the search.
Results returned by each server are displayed in the Search results tables. By selecting a row in the Servers table, the corresponding results are displayed in the Search results table. The Status column in the Servers table is continuously updated with status information for the corresponding download.
The exact contents and format of each retuned table will depend on what the server returned in response to the SSAP query. The example below shows a typical case for IUE data:
Table columns can be resized and moved around by dragging the mouse over the column headers.
Bug: Tool tips over table cells do not work properly once columns are moved around.
Resulst tables can be sorted by clicking the mouse on the desired column’s heading. The sort status cycles from unsorted, to sorted in ascending order, to sorted in descending order, and back to unsorted, every time the mouse is clicked.
The sort status is signaled by a small triangular symbol that shows up on the column heading.
Hierarchical sorts can be performed by holding the Ctrl key while performing the sort on a given column. In that case, the sort status of previously sorted columns remains unchanged.
The sorting algorithm treats all columns as character strings, thus the sorting order is always lexical (not numerical).
To download the desired spectrograms, just select the corresponding rows in the results table and hit the Download button. Multiple selections can be performed using either the Shift or the Ctrl keys simultaneously with the mouse actions.
The Download button acts on a per-server basis; that is, there is a separate button for each server.
Once downloads start, the sorting mechanism described in Sec. 13.5.2 is temporarily disabled. Only when all SSAP servers finished downloading, sorting is re-enabled again.
The Stop button stops all downloads from a given SSAP server.
The download status of each spectrogram will be displayed in the Downloaded column. An example is depicted below.
The download status can assume the following states:
NO |
Spectrogram not downloaded yet |
wait… |
Waiting for server response |
YES |
Spectrogram download complete |
STOPPED |
Download stopped by user |
ERROR |
Error in download |
Number |
Number of bytes already transferred from server |
Hovering the mouse cursor over a particular cell in the Download column will generate a temporary message with more information about the status of the corresponding download operation.
Spectrograms that fail to download, or were stopped in their tracks, can be retried again. Experience has shown that some servers do not support a very large number of simultaneous downloads. Error conditions may occur randomly. It remains to be seen if this behavior is normal or caused by a subtle bug in the multithreaded code in Specview.
Downloading with a sorted table may cause some flashing of the table display. This is basically a computational speed problem and should be less noticeable with smaller tables and faster CPUs.
With the potential of downloading hundreds of spectrograms with a few keystrokes, one may run into memory size problems. In these cases, an “OutOfMemoryError” message may be displayed on the system console or pop up on a dialog window. The software may become broken or unresponsive after that happens, so it is advisable to just start over the entire Specview application.
If you expect to be working with large numbers of spectrograms, or very large ones (such as some ISO formats), see the “Memory requirements” section in the INSTALL_NOTES.txt file distributed in the Specview package for instructions on how to increase the amount of available memory for the Java Virtual Machine.
Using settings in a preferences file (Sec. 9), users can specify their own registries and servers.
A registry list pointed to by the VORegistries user preference is a simple XML file that lists the URLs used to access each registry. An example would look like this:
<Registries>
<URL>http://nvo.stsci.edu/voregistry</URL>
<URL>http://voservices.net/registry</URL>
</Registries>
Each row in the table contains a single URL. If present, the file will be read at startup time, and registries listed in it will be added to the registry menu contents (Sec. 13.2).
Additional SSAP servers can be added to the existing Internal list of servers defined in the in the Registry menu. The SSAPServers user preference should be defined in the preferences file, with value being the URL of the list of additional SSAP servers. This list is a XML file patterned according to the existing registry standard. An example would look like this:
<?xml version="1.0"
encoding="utf-8"?>
<ArrayOfSimpleResource
xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xmlns="http://www.us-vo.org">
<SimpleResource>
<Title>Hubble Space Telescope
Faint Object Spectrograph</Title>
<ShortName>HST
FOS</ShortName>
<ServiceURL>http://archive.eso.org/bin/fos_ssap.pl</ServiceURL>
</SimpleResource>
<SimpleResource>
<Title>INES: The IUE Newly
Extracted Spectra</Title>
<ShortName>IUE</ShortName>
<ServiceURL>http://sdc.laeff.esa.es/ines/jsp…</ServiceURL>
</SimpleResource>
</ArrayOfSimpleResource>
Each server is defined by three entries: