Introducing gclusters 11.12, “Hergest Ridge”

Hello, just a few lines to let you know that the gclusters website (also known as Galactic Globular Clusters Database, GGC-DB) has been updated this morning. The present release is 11.12 “Herdest Ridge” (our codename being based upon Mike Oldfield discography, this supersedes the previous Ommadawn release), in which the most recent values of parameters has been loaded from the 2010 compilation of W.E. Harris (see this astro-ph for details on Harris 2010).

I thinks some words are needed to illustrate the details of the this release. You may already know that the 2o1o version of the Harris’  catalogue do present some modification, for what concerns the details of the listed parameters (more info at http://physwww.physics.mcmaster.ca/~harris/mwgc.ref ). Given that I had built the website of gclusters following closely the Harris’ 2003 release, I had to take a few decision during the update to the latest Harris catalogue.

After a lot of thinking (and some attempt..) I choose to follow this rationale:

– For the time being, no major modification have been done in gclusters, for that concerns the list of parameters to display (they mimiks closely Harris 2003, plus all the “bonus” of gclusters, i.e., bibliography, color magnitude diagrams, etc…)

– Where available, “old” values of parameters (Harris 2003) have been superseded by “new” values (Harris 2010)

– Columns not listed anymore by Harris 2010, are still present in gclusters, but their values has not been globally updated (there are some handpicked updates available, anyway: you may notice the red dot, here and there…)

– In the near future, some of the new columns choosen by Harris 2010, could be imported in gclusters as well.

If you are a user of gclusters, I strongly encourage you to let me know of any problem you may find with this new release (and/or any other feedback); this will help me a lot in giving a useful product to the community !

Meanwhile, do not forget to have a look at the early release of the VOGCLUSTERS web application, that you can find at http://dame.dsf.unina.it/vogclusters.html

Marco Castellani :: INAF – Rome Astronomical Observatory

VOGCLUSTERS, Data Mining WebApp on GCs

Dear friend, just  a line to let you know that our upcoming  web application on Globular  Clusters (codename VOGCLUSTERS) is moving towards its first release.

VOGCLUSTER art 😉

“The goal of the project VOGCLUSTERS is the design and development of a web application specialized in the data and text mining activities for astronomical archives related to globular clusters. Main services are employed for the simple and quick navigation in the archives (uniformed under VO standards and constraints) and their manipulation to correlate and integrate internal scientific information. The project has not to be intended as a straightforward website for the globular clusters, but as a web application…”

http://voneural.na.infn.it/vogclusters.html

We are on private testing, and hope to open the first web app to the general public as soon as possible. Check the quoted webpage for more info and to know when will be avaliable (if you want to be notified, leave a comment to this post)

… Stay tuned 😉

Kind regards,

Marco C.

New address for gclusters

Dear friend,

just a couple of fast updates on the gcluster project, since it’s a lot of time from our last post. We have good news: the building of a web application (VOGCLUSTERS) is still under developement, but we’re getting quite near to a first public release 😉

Meanwhile, the “classical” website of gcluster, for technical problems, has changed address: you can find it now at
http://gclusters.altervista.org

We also have an associated group on Mendeley, where we collect relevant papers for globular clusters aficionados:
http://www.mendeley.com/research-papers/collections/2568111/gclusters/.

Feel free to subscribe, if you’re in that network too 😉

Marco Castellani