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| National Virtual Observatory : IDL Virtual Observatory Libraries | ||||||||||||||
Virtual Observatory Libraries for IDL
VOlib is a new set of IDL libraries to work with tools and services of the Virtual Observatory. If you're an astronomer and familiar with RSIs Interactive Data Language (IDL), say with GSFC's Astrolib , then you might find this library useful.VOlib takes advantage of a number facilities only offered in IDL 6.+. These include the IDL Java Bridge and the IDLffXMLDOMDocument class and subclasses. VOlib will not work unless you have IDL 6.+ and JAVA installed on your system.
Current implementations include a VO Table Reader (a writer is on the way), access to Cone Servers, Simple Image Access Protocol servers, the NVO Registry (as STSci), and calls to the Open Sky Query data access service.
The general idea is that an IDL user can make relatively simple (i.e., one line) function calls to access images, catalogs, and other services through IDL. Whenever possible, returned data are stored in structures, and so understanding how IDL utilizies structures is important to make use of VOlib.
The author welcomes contributions, bug alerts, and general comments. But please be warned up front: The Virtual Observatory is a work in progress: standards evolve, servers go down, etc. Most of these problems cannot be fixed by editing the IDL code (but sometimes they can).
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