SkyView v3.2.0 Preview: Summary

Next week we will be releasing version 3.2.0 of SkyView. You can play with it right now if you specify the version v3.2.0 in the SkyView URL, but it’s still being tested. There are several major changes in this release and we’ll be putting out a series of posts describing them in detail. Major changes include:
– Survey description files are now downloaded (and cached) as needed from the SkyView web site. This means that SkyView-in-a-Jar users will no longer need to update the their local copy of the JAR file to take advantage of updates to surveys.
– The SkyView jar used to contain the data for a few smaller generally fairly old surveys. To further reduce the size of the jar, these have been taken out.
– Survey description files now contain a set of fields that give simple, uniform, quantitative information on surveys (frequency, epoch, resolution, sensitivity) in a format easily used by a machine.
– There are new capabilities to extract and display these quantities as CSV downloads or in interactive plots.