VISTA Exploitation: WFAU

巡天是现代天文学研究的基础，它提供了获取研究稀有天体和星群性质所需的观测数据样本的最有效手段。英国在巡天天文学方面有着悠久的历史，爱丁堡大学的广域天文学单位（WFAU）长期以来一直处于这一活动的最前沿，无论是自1999年以目前的形式创建以来，还是在其前身，即皇家爱丁堡天文台的英国施密特望远镜单位（UKSTU）。世界天文学和天文学联合会开发了科学档案系统，安全地储存来自天空观测的数据，并通过互联网以灵活的方式提供给用户。WFCAM科学档案馆现已投入使用，VISTA科学档案馆正在进入最后的发展阶段。WFAU在操作这些档案方面的主要挑战是现代天空测量系统产生的大量数据，以及以帮助用户科学利用这些数据的方式向用户提供数据的必要性。随着数据量的增加，用户不再能够将他们想要分析的所有数据下载到自己的计算机上，因此WFAU工作的一个越来越多的重点是开发软件，以便在数据中心内执行一系列基本数据分析任务。用户将能够直接在WFAU档案中的天空调查数据上运行这些数据，然后下载衍生的数据产品，这些产品的大小要小得多。VISTA望远镜很快将开始日常运作，为英国和其他ESO成员国的天文学家提供近红外巡天数据。这笔赠款将资助研究界对VISTA调查的科学利用。

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 the University of 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. 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 WFCAM Science Archive is now in operation, and the VISTA Science Archive is entering its final stages of development. 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. The VISTA telescope is soon to start routine operations, providing near-infrared sky survey data for astronomers in the UK and in the other ESO member states. This grant will fund support of the scientific exploitation of the VISTA surveys by the research community.