Those of you who weren't able to visit our exhibit booth at the Washington, D.C. meeting of the AAS missed the unveiling of our new XML public archive. That new development is described in this issue.
Also in this issue, Kirk Borne describes Project AstroData, an educational and public outreach activity conducted as an adjunct to his HST research project.
ADC staffer Dr. Nils Odegard has accepted a position with the Microwave Anisotropy Probe (MAP) Project and is leaving the ADC. Good Luck Nils, and thanks for all your good work at the ADC.
During the course of the ADC's eXtensible Markup Language (XML) research effort, we've made various developments public through on-line prototypes and demonstrations. An important step forward has been made in the last few months of 2001 with the establishment of a public XML-based repository of ADC data and the unveiling of the first data access services for this repository. The repository and services were shown to attendees of the American Astronomical Society Meeting held in Washington, D.C. earlier this month.
The data sets in the public repository are subject to verification that they meet the specifications of the ADC's dataset document type definition (DTD), version 0.53. The contents of the data sets are also inspected prior to their inclusion in the public archive. The dataset DTD incorporates the eXtensible Data Format (XDF) definition. More information on XDF is available at http://xml.gsfc.nasa.gov/XDF/XDF_home.html.
The process of converting the ADC's data holdings to XML for inclusion in this repository is on-going. The XML archive currently stands at more than 500 data sets and growing. The first of the data access services includes a form-based metadata search and various browse indices (author, keyword, etc.)
Access to the ADC's XML Public Archive is available on the Web at http://xml.gsfc.nasa.gov/archive/.
As part of a NASA-funded Hubble Space Telescope (HST) research project, staff at the ADC received an augmentation grant to support Education and Public Outreach (E&PO) activities. To carry out this project, the E&PO team Principal Investigator K.Borne is collaborating with ADC staff members Jim Gass and Jim Blackwell, with NSSDC scientist Dr. Beth Brown, and with several external collaborators (Sue Higley, summer teacher at NSSDC; Dr. David Patton of Trent University; plus two other educators). Dr. Patton is the PI of the parent HST project.
The goal of the project, dubbed Project AstroData, is to develop a pilot series of on-line science education tutorials and exercises for K-12 students. These products are intended to demonstrate the connections between new HST observations and existing astronomical data at the ADC that students can easily access. Some of the student lessons focus specifically on the subject of the parent HST observing program: a study of colliding and merging galaxies within the context of an evolving universe. Connections are demonstrated between exciting HST images and previously catalogued astronomical data at the ADC. These connections provide the basis of the lesson plans.
The project's educational resources are universally available on-line via the WWW on the new Project AstroData web site. These resources include the Project AstroData activities, lesson plans, HST images, and related tutorials. There are tutorials explaining the ADC archive and astronomical tabular data catalogs. There is an image collection showing some of the finest HST images of colliding galaxies. There is a large list of related links that connect to other sites that illustrate the science of colliding galaxies. There is a tutorial and set of links describing the HST itself. Finally, of course, there are lesson plans and class exercises. There are specific lesson plans for various grade levels and separately for math and astronomy/science. A comprehensive compilation of external links are provided to educators, including lesson plans produced by other organizations, national and state education standards, and topics in assessment and evaluation.
The lesson plans that we have developed address very specific national and state standards. In addition to the formal lesson plans, there are four "missions" for the students to carry out. These web-based "mission" activities are geared toward classroom participation in groups, though they can be assigned on an individual student basis as well. An innovative and comprehensive graphical interface to several on-line astronomical glossaries and dictionaries is provided, to enable the students to readily explore any astronomical concept or object class. This is therefore suitable for classroom use at any level and with any other astronomy lesson plan in use elsewhere.
If you have any questions or need additional information regarding this project, check out the Project AstroData web site at http://adc.astro.umd.edu/adc/education/astrodata/ or contact the author by e-mail at Kirk.Borne@gsfc.nasa.gov.
The following catalogs and journal tables are currently available from the ADC repository. The ADC gratefully acknowledges the CDS, and individual authors who have recently contributed to our repository.
See http://adc.astro.umd.edu/adc/acq_new_updated.html#new_listfor a hypertext version of this article containing direct links to each catalog and journal table listed.
ID# Abbreviated Title (First Author, Year)
1256 Carlsberg Meridian Catalogs (CMC, 1999)
1273 Extragalactic Reference Link Catalog (ERLcat) (de Vegt+, 2001)
1275 The AC 2000.2 Catalogue (Urban+ 2001)
2232 UBV photometry of selected regions in the MCs (Braun 2001)
2233 Tycho variables stars (Piquard 2001)
3227 General Catalog of galactic Carbon stars, Ed. (Alksnis+ 2001)
5105 SKY2000 Catalog, Version 3 (Myers+ 2000)
7225 The Canada-France Redshift Survey (CFRS) (Lilly+, 1995)
8062 The Westerbork Northern Sky Survey (Leiden, 1998)
J/A+A/258/243 HRV of Abell 151 galaxies (Proust+, 1992)
J/A+A/327/325 Distances of molecular cloud (May+, 1997)
J/A+A/363/29 Variable stars in IC 1613 (Antonello+, 2000)
J/A+A/368/912 Polarization and rotational velocities of Be stars (Yudin, 2001)
J/A+A/369/812 UVKs photometry of globular clusters in NGC 5128 (Rejkuba, 2001)
J/A+A/371/497 OB associations in the spiral galaxy NGC 300 (Pietrzynski+, 2001)
J/A+A/373/608 Early-type stars towards the Galactic Center. II. (Dufton+, 2001)
J/A+A/373/730 The IUE Absolute Flux Scale (Gonzalez-Riestra+, 2001)
J/A+A/375/1 IR observations of Chandra Deep Field + HDF-South (Saracco+, 2001)
J/A+A/375/285 Photometric observations of 9 Near-Earth Objects (Szabo+, 2001)
J/A+A/375/366 Carbon stars from the Hamburg/ESO survey (Christlieb+ 2001)
J/A+A/375/527 JHKL' photometry of AGB stars (Kerschbaum+, 2001)
J/A+A/375/539 JHK photometry of compact HII regions in Cyg X (Comeron+, 2001)
J/A+A/375/591 SUMER Spectral Atlas of Solar Disk Features (Curdt+, 2000)
J/A+A/375/614 Astrolabe observations of the Sun in 1990-2000 (Noel, 2001)
J/A+A/375/661 Stability of VLBI reference frame (Gontier+, 2001)
J/A+A/375/670 Photographic observations of radio stars (Rizvanov+, 2001)
J/A+A/376/1106 Forbidden transitions in Co(16+) (Charro+, 2001)
J/A+A/376/1113 Line ratios for helium-like ions (Porquet+, 2001)
J/A+A/376/1123 Bright southern sub-mm pointing sources (Adraou+, 2001)
J/A+A/376/144 BV(RI)_C_H{alpha} photometry of NGC 663 (Pigulski+, 2001)
J/A+A/376/158 SV Cam BVR light curves (Albayrak+, 2001)
J/A+A/376/28 Inversion of the HE 1122-1628 UVES spectrum (Rollinde+ 2001)
J/A+A/376/333 Einstein A-coefficients for C_3_H_4_ (Sharma+, 2001)
J/A+A/376/356 Diatomic molecules collisional rates (Chandra+, 2001)
J/A+A/376/441 Absolute proper motions of 112 open clusters (Dias+, 2001)
J/A+A/376/561 Rc light curves of 7 variables in M37 (Kiss+, 2001)
J/A+A/376/775 UBVRI and H-beta observations of 3C 390.3 (Shapovalova+ 2001)
J/A+A/376/982 Near IR observations of young binaries (Woitas+, 2001)
J/A+A/376/997 Galactic mass-losing AGB stars (Le Bertre+, 2001)
J/A+A/377/123 Equivalent widths of 6 binaries (Gratton+, 2001)
J/A+A/377/361 Fe II transition probabilities and loggf (Pickering+, 2001)
J/A+A/377/428 Abell 970 galaxies radial velocities (Sodre+, 2001)
J/A+A/377/442 Chandra Deep Field South: R-band photometry (Wolf+, 2001)
J/A+A/377/801 Fourth list of the Karachentsev catalog (Huchtmeier+, 2001)
J/A+A/377/911 Solar neighbourhood age-metallicity relation (Feltzing+, 2001)
J/A+A/377/925 Radial velocity curves of Vela X-1 (Barziv+, 2001)
J/A+A/377/945 Variability and spectra of LMC giants (Cioni+ 2001)
J/A+A/378/113 Ap stars periodicity (Catalano+, 2001)
J/A+A/378/116 EXPORT vsini of Vega-type and pms stars (Mora+, 2001)
J/A+A/378/30 ROSAT-BSC galaxy identifications (Zimmermann+, 2001)
J/A+A/378/556 UVES/VLT spectra of white dwarfs (Koester+, 2001)
J/A+A/378/861 Spectroscopy of Be stars (Chauville+, 2001)
J/A+A/378/954 CCD measurements of double stars (Gili+, 2001)
J/A+A/379/136 UBVRI photometry of 3 young open clusters (Carraro+, 2001)
J/A+A/379/162 Binaries with post-T Tauri secondaries (Gerbaldi+, 2001)
J/A+A/379/21 Radio-optically selected galaxy clusters I. (Zanichelli+, 2001)
J/A+A/379/305 Envelope Tomography of LPV stars (Alvarez, 2001)
J/A+A/379/35 Radio-optically selected galaxy clusters. II. (Zanichelli+, 2001)
J/A+A/379/453 CCD BVI photometry of 5 open cluster candidates (Piatti+, 2001)
J/A+A/379/54 (S+S) binary galaxies BVRI photometry (Hernandez-Toledo+, 2001)
J/A+A/379/564 Vega-type and PMS stars UBVRI photo-polarimetry (Oudmaijer+, 2001)
J/A+A/379/755 Radio data of X- and gamma-ray loud blazars (Venturi+, 2001)
J/A+A/379/90 Candidate Planetary Nebulae in M 81 (Magrini+, 2001)
J/A+A/379/976 Moving groups late-type stars eq. widths + fluxes (Montes+ 2001)
J/A+A/379/999 The CORALIE survey for extrasolar planets. VI (Santos+ 2001)
J/A+A/380/238 Long-period companions of multiple stars (Shatsky, 2001)
J/A+A/380/258 V light curve of AzV 73 (Ostrov+, 2001)
J/A+A/380/300 Abundances of PN towards Galactic bulge (Escudero+, 2001)
J/A+A/380/347 BVRI photometry of 27 Kuiper Belt Objects (Delsanti+, 2001)
J/A+A/380/441 Galaxies behind Southern Milky Way. II. (Woudt+, 2001)
J/A+A/380/478 BVI photometry in NGC 6101 (Marconi+, 2001)
J/A+A/380/578 Equiv. widths of 13 horizontal branch stars (Tautvaisiene+, 2001)
J/A+A/380/609 Southern emission-line stars multiphotometry (de Winter+, 2001)
J/A+A/380/665 Massive dense cores with ^13^CO J#1-0 lines (Wu+, 2001)
J/A+A/380/727 1995 Saturnian satellite observations (Vienne+, 2001)
J/A+A/381/32 Galactic Cepheid abundances (Andrievsky+, 2002)
J/A+A/381/446 Astrometric Radial Velocities. III. (Madsen+, 2002)
J/A+A/381/464 Proper motions and membership in NGC 2548 (Wu+, 2002)
J/A+A/381/500 Eu abundances in F and G disk stars (Koch+, 2002)
J/A+A/381/507 Fe II emission lines of RR Tel (Kotnik-Karuza+, 2002)
J/A+A/381/65 BVI photometry of NGC 2099 (Nilakshi+, 2002)
J/A+A/381/757 List of extra-galactic radio jets (Liu+, 2002)
J/A+AS/43/1 Westerbork observations of Galactic Sources (Fanti+ 1981)
J/A+AS/71/221 The 65W part of the WSRT 21 cm survey in Lynx (Oort, 1987)
J/A+AS/73/103 The 64W part of the WRST Survey (Oort+, 1988)
J/A+AS/139/231 Early-type stars towards the Galactic Centre (Dufton+, 1999)
J/A+AS/146/407 Symbiotic stars catalogue (Belczynski+, 2000)
J/AJ/95/284 Radial velocities in 14 rich clusters (Dressler+ 1988)
J/AJ/115/1212==>catalogs/1/1275/
J/AJ/118/1131 Radial velocities in A3565 and A3560 (Willmer+, 1999)
J/AJ/118/2409 VRI photometry of {lambda} Ori PMS stars (Dolan+, 1999)
J/AJ/114/2402 Rotation curves of early-type galaxies (Courteau+, 1997)
J/AJ/120/2190 Caltech Faint Galaxy Redshift Survey. XIV (van den Bergh+, 2000)
J/AJ/121/2020 CTIO and WFPC2 photometry in NGC 6822 (Bianchi+, 2001)
J/AJ/121/2124 {lambda} Ori pre-main-sequence stars photometry (Dolan+, 2001)
J/AJ/121/2189 Stars within 8 pc of the Sun (Oppenheimer+, 2001)
J/AJ/121/2308 Sloan Digital Sky Survey quasar photometry (Richards+, 2001)
J/AJ/121/2331 SDSS redshifts in the Coma cluster (Castander+, 2001)
J/AJ/121/2381 UBRI photometry of radio galaxies (Brown+, 2001)
J/AJ/121/2843 QSOs in 2MASS second incremental data release (Barkhouse+, 2001)
J/AJ/121/2673 3{mu}m survey of the Chamaeleon I dark cloud (Kenyon+, 2001)
J/AJ/121/2815==>catalogs/1/1273/
J/AJ/121/2895 HDF-N Caltech faint galaxy redshift survey. XIII. (Cohen 2001)
J/AJ/121/3048 Multicolor photometry in NGC 1512 and NGC 5248 (Maoz+, 2001)
J/AJ/121/3114 UBVR photometry of NGC 6712 with VLT (Paltrinieri+, 2001)
J/AJ/121/3160 JHK photometry near the Trapezium region (Carpenter+, 2001)
J/AJ/121/3224 Speckle interferometry of HIP binaries (Mason+, 2001)
J/AJ/122/503 SDSS u*g*r*i*z* photometry and redshift of QSOs (Anderson+, 2001)
J/AJ/122/518 Large Bright Quasar Survey (LBQS) VII (Hewett+, 2001)
J/AJ/122/611 Caltech Faint Galaxy Redshift Survey. XV. (van den Bergh+, 2001)
J/AJ/122/714 VR photometry of Century Survey galaxies (Brown+, 2001)
J/AJ/122/866 X-ray sources in IC 348 from Chandra (Preibisch+, 2001)
J/ApJ/455/50==>catalogs/7/7225
J/ApJ/455/60==>catalogs/7/7225
J/ApJ/455/75==>catalogs/7/7225
J/ApJ/455/88==>catalogs/7/7225
J/ApJ/455/96==>catalogs/7/7225
J/ApJ/470/864 JHKL photometry of the Galactic Center (Blum+, 1996)
J/ApJ/523/248 Variable stars in the Galactic center (Ott+, 1999)
J/ApJ/548/127 Hubble Deep Field-South region (Teplitz+ 2001)
J/ApJ/551/111 HDF early-type and spiral galaxies (Ellis+, 2001)
J/ApJ/551/852 FCRAO CO survey of the outer Galaxy (Heyer+, 2001)
J/ApJ/551/973 Variables near SN 1991T in NGC 4527 (Saha+, 2001)
J/ApJ/552/289 Semiregular variable stars in Baade's windows (Alard+, 2001)
J/ApJ/554/202 ROSAT X-ray observations of M81 (Immler+, 2001)
J/ApJ/554/742 Chandra Deep Survey of the HDF-N (Hornschemeier+, 2001)
J/ApJ/554/L129 X-ray luminosity-velocity dispersion relation (Mahdavi+, 2001)
J/ApJ/562/303 Old Stellar Populations of the SMC (Dolphin+ 2001)
J/ApJS/89/57 IRAS galaxies behind southern Milky Way (Yamada+, 1993)
J/ApJS/119/83 IUE sample of binaries with hot component (Parsons+, 1998)
J/ApJS/126/19 BATSE gamma-ray burst spectral catalog. I. (Preece+, 2000)
J/ApJS/134/355 Radio galaxies in 18 nearby Abell clusters (Miller+, 2001)
J/ApJS/134/385 Supplement to the BATSE gamma-ray burst catalogs (Kommers+, 2001)
J/ApJS/134/77 ASCA Galactic Plane Survey faint X-ray sources (Sugizak+, 2001)
J/ApJS/135/155 Radio identification of 3EG EGRET sources (Mattox+, 2001)
J/ApJS/135/41 Spectroscopic and photometric redshifts (Fernandez-Soto+, 2001)
/AZh/78/675 Quasar-galaxy associations (Bukhmastova, 2001)
J/AZh/78/807 Chemical composition of eta Ser (Antipova+, 2001)
J/MNRAS/296/599 A3558 complex redshifts (Bardelli+, 1998)
J/MNRAS/312/540 Redshift survey of intercluster galaxies (Bardelli+, 2000)
J/MNRAS/313/641 FAUST obs. in the Fourth Galactic Quadrant (Brosch+, 2000)
J/MNRAS/320/387 The A3528 complex (Bardelli+, 2001)
J/MNRAS/321/277 EFAR Catalog. VII. (Colless+, 2001)
J/MNRAS/323/757 Deep X-Ray Radio Blazar Survey (DXRBS). II. (Landt+, 2001)
J/MNRAS/323/839 HST photometry of A2218 early-type galaxies (Smail+, 2001)
J/MNRAS/324/580 FAUST sources in NGC 4038-39 and 6752 direction (Daniels+, 2001)
J/MNRAS/325/1365 Solar neighbourhood metallicity distribution (Haywood+, 2001)
J/MNRAS/325/931 Metal-poor subdwarfs in the Hipparcos catalog (Reid+, 2001)
J/MNRAS/326/473 LOSVDs of low-luminosity elliptical galaxies (Halliday+ 2001)
J/MNRAS/326/959 Empirical calibration of the near-IR Ca triplet (Cenarro+ 2001)
J/PASP/113/267 Mount Wilson catalogue photometric properties (Sandage, 2001)
J/other/BaltA/8.325 Radial velocities of Pop. II stars (Bartkevicius+ 2001)
J/other/BaltA/10/1==>catalogs/3/3227/
J/other/PASJ/53.653 SSA 22 field NIR imaging (Tamura+, 2001)
J/other/PASJ/53.445 ASCA Deep survey in Lockman Hole Field (Ishisaki+, 2001)
J/other/KFNT/15.483 Positions of Thebe and Amalthea (Ledovskaya+ 2001)
ID# Abbreviated Title (First Author, Year)
Data updated or corrected:
3086 SKYLAB S-019 Far-UV Objective-Prism Spectrophotometry (Henize+ 1979)
J/A+A/272/235 Star formation in L1251: distance and members (Prusti 1993)
J/A+A/320/185 T Tauri UBVRIcJHKL photometry (Wichmann+ 1997)
J/A+A/345/505 UBVI magnitudes of NGC 869 B-type pulsators (Krzesinski+, 2001)
J/AJ/106/1273 The kinematics of dense clusters of galaxies. I. (Zabludoff 1993)
J/MNRAS/240/785 Multicolour photometry of the cluster of gal (Millington 1982)
J/ApJS/66/387 The Case low-dispersion Northern Sky Survey. VII (Sanduleak 1988)
Additional data added:
J/A+A/373/63 M31 second ROSAT PSPC survey (Supper+, 2001)
J/A+A/373/757 Lyman-Alpha Forest of 3 QSOs (Kim+, 2001)
The ADC Electronic News is published four times a year. It is a free service that we hope you will find of value. If any of your colleagues would like to subscribe, they may do so by sending E-mail to Majordomo@adc.astro.umd.edu with the command
SUBSCRIBE ADC-SUBSCRIBERS
in the body of the message -- not in the subject line. The sender will receive two messages, the first is a standard Majordomo response and the second is a "welcome" message. If you do not want to receive any more issues, send E-mail to Majordomo@adc.astro.umd.edu and in the body of the message put in the command
UNSUBSCRIBE ADC-SUBSCRIBERS .
Hypertext versions of the back issues are available via WWW. These can be found through the ADC home page, at URL
or ASCII text versions are also available via anonymous FTP to adc.astro.umd.edu in directory pub/adc/adc_enews.
For assistance or information send inquiries to: Astronomical Data Center Code 631 NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Greenbelt, Maryland 20771 USA Internet: help@adc.astro.umd.edu Telephone: (301) 286-8310; FAX: (301) 286-1771