The astronomical database SIMBAD developed at the Centre de Donn ees de Strasbourg CDS currently contains about one million objects stellar and non stellar all described by heterogeneous data bibliographical references measurements and identi ers SIMBAD supplies the existing links between the di erent synonym names of one object and describes astronomical objects with information coming from th...

1 MIRA project, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Mitaka, Tokyo 181-8588, Japan e-mail: [email protected] e-mail: [email protected] 2 Extrasolar Planet Project Office, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Mitaka, Tokyo 181-8588, Japan 3 Division of Optical and Infrared Astronomy, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, Mitaka, Tokyo 181-8588, Japan 4 Max-Planc...

Where appropriate repositories are not available to support all relevant astronomical data products, data can fall into darkness: unseen and unavailable for future reference and re-use. Some data in this category are legacy or old data, but newer datasets are also often uncurated and could remain dark. This paper provides a description of the design motivation and development of Astrolabe, a cy...

Classical black holes are solutions of the field equations of General Relativity. Many astronomical observations suggest that black holes really exist in nature. However, an unambiguous proof for their existence is still lacking. Neither event horizon nor intrinsic curvature singularity have been observed by means of astronomical techniques. This paper introduces to particular features of black...

Over the last few years, an enormous amount of studies has been devoted to astronomical image restoration. The new challenge, nowadays, has been reported on the use of multichannel techniques to restore, segment and classify such images. The multichannel image segmentation problem, is a new field of great interest for the astronomical community. This paper presents an unsupervised method to aut...

This chapter describes how astronomical imaging survey data have become a vital part of modern astronomy, how these data are archived and then served to the astronomical community through on-line data access portals. The Virtual Observatory, now under development, aims to make all these data accessible through a uniform set of interfaces. This chapter also describes the scientific need for one ...

We present a summary of the major contributions to the Special Session on Data Management held at the IAU General Assembly in Prague in 2006. While recent years have seen enormous improvements in access to astronomical data, and the Virtual Observatory aims to provide astronomers with seamless access to on-line resources, more attention needs to be paid to ensuring the quality and completeness ...

This paper outlines a new applicaton of the technique of drift scanning, for single-dish radio continuum measurements within a radome. A radome scatters varying amounts of ground radiation into the receiver feed for di erent antenna positions, causing di cult-to-cancel total power uctuations as astronomical sources are tracked. Parking the telescope and allowing a source to drift through the be...