WFAU Science Archives 2023-2026

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Sky surveys underpin much of modern astronomical research, by providing the most efficient means of deriving samples of observational data required for the study of rare objects and of the properties of populations of sources. The UK has a very strong history in survey astronomy and Edinburgh's Wide Field Astronomy Unit (WFAU) has long been at the forefront of this activity, both since its creation in its current guise, in 1999, and in its previous incarnation, as the UK Schmidt Telescope Unit (UKSTU) of the Royal Observatory Edinburgh.This grant will support WFAU's continuing curation of data from a number of optical/near-infrared imaging and spectroscopic surveys, namely:(i) continuation of the UKIRT Hemisphere Survey and production from it of a new northern-sky optical/NIR survey through incorporation of Pan-STARRS1 optical data; (ii) completion of publication of data from the final VISTA Public Surveys - VHS, VVV(X), UltraVISTA and SHARKs; (iii) creation of a new all-sky near-infrared sky based on the combination of UHS and VHS data; (iv) publication of data from the PRIMER JWST Treasury Program, together with existing ground-based data in the UltraVISTA/COSMOS and UKIDSS/UDS fields; and (v) creation of a new archive to publish data from Galactic and extragalactic surveys being undertaken in guaranteed time by the MOONS Consortium. WFAU adds value to these survey datasets by enabling users to query them in conjunction with external catalogues - either local copies stored in Edinburgh or via the Virtual Observatory. In this, we support multi-wavelength astronomy, which is increasingly the most important mode of observational analysis. WFAU has developed science archive systems which store securely data from sky surveys and make them available to users in a flexible manner via the Internet. The main challenges for WFAU in operating these archives are the volumes of data generated by modern sky survey systems, and the necessity of making the data available to users in a way that helps them to exploit those data scientifically. As data volumes increase, users are no longer able to download to their own computers all the data they want to analyse, so an increasing focus of WFAU work is the development of software to perform a set of basic data analysis tasks within the data centre. Users will be able to run these directly on the sky survey data in WFAU's archives, and then download derived data products, which will be much smaller in size. New capabilities will allow users to analyse data without downloading it, by the running of a Jupyter Hub service next to the data, and an Apache Spark service for VVV(X), both within the IRIS (www.iris.ac.uk) cloud.Ensuring success of the WFAU programme depends on the staff within the Unit having the correct range of skills. While the computational side of WFAU's work is ever increasing, it is important that members of WFAU staff working on science archive project work retain the astronomical expertise required to interact effectively with WFAU's user community.