Abstracts for NAM and MIST/UKSP 2006

NAM 2006

N.A. Walton (1), The AstroGrid Consortium

(1) Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge (2) http://www.astrogrid.org

AstroGrid, the UK's Virtual Observatory system, will be releasing its latest fully operational release system, 2006.2, during NAM2006.

This poster describes the increased functionalities offered to the end user in the 2006.2 release. The key data resources and applications accessible through the AstroGrid workbench will be itemised, Details of how astronomers can gain access to the system will be given.

We note the use of technologies and interoperability standards, and how use of AstroGrid gives end user access truly global resources, including large repositories of data across the UK, Europe, the USA and elsewhere.

We show how the astronomer can easily discover and visualise data from any major data centre by use of the 'AstroScope'. How then data from this can be stored in 'MySpace' and processed using applications either on the uses local machine or on remote servers. Specific example use cases are noted.

See http://software.astrogrid.org for further details.

MIST/UKSP 2006

Solar System data access and analysis with AstroGrid

S. Dalla (1), E. Gonzalez-Solares (2), A.M.S. Richards (1), J.A. Tedds (3) and N.A. Walton (2)

(1) School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Manchester, (2) Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge, (3) Dept. of Physics and Astronomy, University of Leicester

AstroGrid is the UK's contribution to a global Virtual Observatory (VO), aimed at allowing seamless access to a variety of Astronomy and Solar System datasets and applications. This presentation will describe the latest release of AstroGrid, with emphasis on the Solar System aspects. The HelioScope service will be presented, providing access to a variety of Heliospheric datasets, and breaking traditional boundaries between different areas of Solar System research. An example of how the AstroGrid Solar Movie Maker service can be used to generate a library of solar movies for a series of events of interest will be shown. In addition to science services, AstroGrid also allows users to develop their own workflows that combine queries to data centers and operations on data: examples of this more advanced type of usage will be presented.

Flare productivity of newly emerged paired and isolated Active Regions

S. Dalla (1), L. Fletcher (2) and N.A. Walton (3)

(1) School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Manchester (2) Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow (3) Institute of Astronomy, University of Cambridge

We investigate whether Active Regions (ARs) that emerge near existing ones on the Sun are more flare productive than those that emerge isolated. We use AstroGrid, the UK's Virtual Observatory, to build a series of workflows that perform queries to catalogues of Active Regions and flares, and operations on the results of the queries, to address this question. We find that the flaring rate within the first three days increases by 70% for paired ARs, compared to isolated ones. The results suggest that the interaction with strong pre-existing field increases the probability of magnetic reconnection and significant change in magnetic topology.