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TOPCAT was initially (2003-2005) developed under the UK
Starlink project
(1980-2005, R.I.P.). From July 2005 until June 2006, it was supported
by grant PP/D002486/1 from the UK's
Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council.
Maintenance and development has been funded from July 2006 until
December 2007 by the
European VOTech project
within the UK's AstroGrid,
and directly from AstroGrid funding following that until June 2009,
and from Euro-VO AIDA funding from then until November 2009.
From December 2009 it is funded by an STFC grant.
Inspiration for many of TOPCAT's features has been taken from the
following pre-existing tools:
Apart from the excellent Java 2 Standard Edition itself,
the following external libraries provide important parts of TOPCAT's
functionality:
-
JEL
(GNU) for algebraic expression evaluation
-
PixTools
(Fermilab EAG) for HEALPix-based celestial sphere row matching
-
ADQLlib
(NVO) for ADQL/X->S translations in registry searches
-
HTM
(Sloan Digital Sky Survey) for HTM-based celestial sphere row matching
(now deprecated within TOPCAT)
-
Ptplot
(Ptolemy) for axis plotting
-
iText
(1T3XT BVBA) for PDF output
-
EPSGraphics2D
(Jibble) for encapsulated postscript output
-
GifEncoder
(Acme) for GIF output
-
IVOA FITS Package
(Sloan Digital Sky Survey) for simple (non-SoG) display of FITS images
-
BrowserLauncher2 for launching default web browser
Contributed code from the following people is gratefully acknowledged:
- Thomas Boch (CDS), for the VizieR load dialogue.
- Gerard Lemson (MPE, Garching) for the GAVO load dialogue.
TOPCAT has benefitted from, and is largely shaped by, advice,
comments and feedback from very many users, testers and developers.
Some of the notable contributers are these:
- Alasdair Allan (Starlink, Exeter)
- Mark Allen (CDS)
- Thomas Boch (CDS)
- Danny Boxhoorn (Kapteyn, Groningen)
- Malcolm Currie (Starlink, RAL)
- Clive Davenhall (Royal Observatory Edinburgh)
- Luke Davies (Bristol)
- Sebastien Derriere (CDS)
- Peter Draper (Starlink, Durham)
- Pierre Fernique (CDS)
- Shashikiran Ganesh (PRL, India)
- David Giaretta (Starlink, RAL)
- Eduardo Gonzalez-Solares (IoA)
- Norman Gray (Starlink, Glasgow)
- Haggis Harris (Bath)
- Evanthia Hatziminaoglou (ESO)
- Jonathan Irwin (Cambridge)
- Tim Jenness (JACH)
- Gerard Lemson (MPE Garching)
- Bob Mann (Royal Observatory Edinburgh)
- Richard McMahon (IoA)
- Guillaume Mella (JMMC)
- David Mills (Bristol)
- Douglas Morgan (Bristol)
- Simon Murphy (ANU)
- Francois Ochsenbein (CDS)
- Clive Page (Leicester)
- Roy Platon (RAL)
- James Price (Bristol)
- Anita Richards (Jodrell Bank)
- Aaron Robotham (Bristol)
- Mike Read (ROE)
- Mike Watson (Leicester)
- Ivan Zolotukhin (SAI MSU)
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TOPCAT - Tool for OPerations on Catalogues And Tables
Starlink User Note253
TOPCAT web page:
http://www.starlink.ac.uk/topcat/
Author email:
m.b.taylor@bristol.ac.uk