TOPCAT Tutorial

Resources

Sections


Basic Usage: Tables, Data and Metadata

Getting Started

Control Window


Table Views

Look at basic table data and metadata by using the items in the Views menu (or equivalent toolbar buttons). Choose a table with some metadata, e.g. the example table 6dfgs_mini (from Examples|Load Example Table menu in Load Window). Other FITS or VOTable tables (especially from Virtual Observatory sources) may have useful metadata; ASCII and CSV tables probably will not.

Data View

Table Parameters (per-table metadata)

Column Metadata

Table Subsets (row selections)

Use a table with some metadata, e.g. the example table 6dfgs_mini (from Examples|Load Example Table menu in Load Window).

Table Statistics


Apparent Table


Load Window


Save Window


Exercise: Add metadata to table

Load a text table into TOPCAT, add column names and descriptions and table parameters, and save it as a FITS file.

TOPCAT has two main text-based formats for tables:

If you strip out all the column headings, you should be able to load the table, but it will have column names like "col1", "col2" etc.

Use the ASCII file extracted.txt, or one of your own.


Plotting


Exercise: Pleiades

(Credit: Niall Deacon, Hawaii)

Exercise: Pleiades revisited

Examine some other colours for the Pleiades cluster you identified in the previous exercise.


Virtual Observatory

Multiple Simple Spectral Access Query


Exercise: Ultra-Luminous X-ray sources

(Credit: M Perez-Torres, Paolo Padovani, Evanthia Hatziminaoglou, ESO)

See Euro-VO case described at http://www.euro-vo.org/pub/fc/workflows/ULX.html. Most of the things described here as being done with Aladin can equally be done with TOPCAT; the exception is the (optional) visualisation of the images.


Exercise: Chamaeleon Cluster

(Credit: Simon Murphy, ANU)

See script at http://www.mso.anu.edu.au/~murphysj/topcat/TOPCATtutorial.pdf.