ESO Archive Science Portal 2.0 released

Published: 23 Apr 2020

The ESO Archive Science Portal allows browsing and exploration of archive content using an intuitive interactive user interface that supports iterative queries or by direct database and Virtual Observatory (VO) access using user scripts and VO-aware tools. The latest version, released on 23 April 2020, provides the features and improvements listed below.

  • Preview capabilities for both data cubes and catalogues have been added. The quality of data cubes can be inspected interactively by extracting 1D spectra within a circle of configurable size at any position covered by the observation. Catalogue source positions are overlaid with the corresponding imaging data and one-dimensional distributions are displayed for each catalog parameter. The resolution of image previews has been enhanced.
  • A cutout service for clipping the original full-size datasets with respect to position or spectral range has been newly implemented and is accessible from the interactive user interface as well as programmatically, via the SODA and DataLink VO-compliant services.
  • User-defined search regions of arbitrary polygonal shape are now supported including interactive drawing and uploading/saving contours from/to disk.
  • The new download portal provides several improvements for greater flexibility including the option to download large sets of science spectra without associated ancillary data, to download all datasets of your query in one ZIP archive, and to use browser-specific download managers.
  • The DataLink service, which provides a standard way to declare relationships between a primary dataset and related files, e.g. provenance, derived products, and ancillary files, has been improved with the selection of calibration reference files for raw data and providing full support for proprietary data.
  • Interactive documentation of the new programmatic features is provided in the form of Python Jupyter notebooks.

Users are encouraged to leave their feedback via the dedicated community forum.