The survey description files for the Fermi soft and hard surveys were improperly formatted so that users attempting to use the SkyView jar in batch mode would not be able to query these surveys. The files have been updated in the latest release (with the new SDSS surveys).
We have been thinking of ways to add more educational aspects to the SkyView website and our first step was to create a slide show of survey data that cover the entire sky. This first image set is in equatorial coordinates and we hope to add galactic images soon and then interactive enhancements as time permits. Of course the first lesson we learn from these images is that the sky looks different in different wavelengths. We also see that certain celestial features come and go. This is typically dependent on the process by which the radiation is emitted.
We hope that these images are interesting to SkyView users. Let us know if you have any comments.
The number of SkyView queries has increased by a factor of 5 over the last year and with our recent move to a virtual machine architecture we have been able to accommodate this growth. However we experienced a spike in usage last night that did affect system availability. Although SkyView is processing queries again we are working with our system administrators to analyze and improve the situation. We apologize for any inconvenience.
Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX) surveys have been updated to use the GALEX GR6 release. As mentioned in a previous post GR6 improvements include more sky coverage and a bit better calibration. Image generation for GALEX may be slow for a period of time as the data file caches get rebuilt. More GALEX mission information can be found at the Space Telescope Science Institute GALEX page.
Over the next week or two we’ll be releasing a new and an updated survey set. The Fermi all-sky data will give us a major new image of the gamma-ray sky. Fermi has higher sensitivity and resolution than the EGRET all-sky map — which was one of SkyView‘s original datasets. Once we get Fermi on-board we anticipate updating this survey every few months until we get to the end of the mission, gradually increasing the sensitivity of the survey. If there is interest we can also provide Fermi data as a time resolved image, e.g., with two month resolution.
We’ll also be updating the GALEX surveys to use the GALEX GR6 release. GR6 has more sky coverage and a bit better calibration than the GR4 data we’ve been serving for the past couple of years. We retrieve GALEX data from STScI caching each image locally the first time it is used. We’ll need to flush our caches when we do the upgrade, so getting GALEX images may slow down a little for a while as the caches get rebuilt.
Due to issues that affected several local systems the SkyView name resolvers were unavailable for 2 days and the SkyView Blog was offline for 10 days. Currently all SkyView services are back online. We apologize for the inconvenience.
To ensure the stability of the SkyView Blog we plan to perform additional maintenance sometime next week. Downtime will be required but should last less than 15 minutes. We appreciate your continued patience.
SkyView will be unavailable for a limited time Tuesday (August 3, 2010) morning as we perform a hardware upgrade. We hope that the downtime will be short but it is possible that some remote survey data and SkyView services may not be immediately available after the upgrade. We will do our best to get everything back online as soon as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience.
The final disk that appears to need repair is being worked on today. We have had to relocate the cache directories so queries that require access to remote systems (ie., FIRST, SDSS, Galex, 2MASS) will be slower as we re-transfer data. The SkyView Image Gallery is back online. Hopefully all recovery efforts will be complete within 24 hours. We thank you for your patience.
One of the constituent disks on a SkyView RAID system failed Monday evening. The disks are supposed to recover automatically from such a failure, but manifestly they did not and our operations personnel had to initiate recovery manually. Recovery activities were initiated in the background which allowed SkyView queries to resume although at a slower rate. A new problem cropped up Wednesday morning that resulted in one of the disks used to store generated images to become READ only. This caused some down time as we scrambled to rearrange disk space. Query processing has resumed once again but the SkyView Image Gallery (both image submission and gallery viewing) is offline until the file system check is completed.
We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience you may have encountered.
Due to a programming bug SkyView images that were been submitted to the Image Gallery since the end of August 2009 have not been displayed. The bug has been fixed and all submitted images now appear in the gallery.
Thanks you for all your submissions!