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## C.1 Acknowledgements

TOPCAT was initially (2003-2005) developed under the UK Starlink project (1980-2005, R.I.P.). Since then it has been supported by grant PP/D002486/1 from the UK's Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, the VOTech project (from EU FP6), the AstroGrid project (from PPARC/STFC), the AIDA project (from EU FP7), grant ST/H008470/1 from the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council, and the GAVO project (BMBF Bewilligungsnummer 05A08VHA). All of this support is gratefully acknowledged.

Nearly all of this work has been done in the Astrophysics Group of the School of Physics, in the University of Bristol, UK, although the University of Cambridge and the University of Heidelberg have also been involved.

Inspiration for many of TOPCAT's features has been taken from the following pre-existing tools:

- Mirage (Bell labs)
- VOPlot (VO-India)

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
- IVOARegistry (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 2D 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.
- Marco Molinaro (INAF-OATS) for the BaSTI 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)
- Christoph Deil (MPI Heidelberg)
- Markus Demleitner (ARI Heidelberg)
- 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)
- JJ Kavelaars (NRC)
- Gerard Lemson (MPE Garching)
- Bob Mann (Royal Observatory Edinburgh)
- Ben Maughan (Bristol)
- Richard McMahon (IoA)
- Guillaume Mella (JMMC)
- David Mills (Bristol)
- Douglas Morgan (Bristol)
- August Muench (CfA)
- 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
Mailing list: topcat-user@bristol.ac.uk