[Please note, this page is a work in progress. Please send suggestions! Unless otherwise noted, all listings are free, open-source, and publicly available]
Data and Image Catalogs / Catalog Tools
- National Virtual Observatory: catalogs, integration tools, database query tools, and much more
- Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS): Includes Simbad, an astronomical object database, VizieR catalog service, and the Aladin sky atlas tools.
- SDSS DR7: Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Data Release 7. See the tutorials if you are just getting started.
- NED: NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database
- IPAC: Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (Science and data center for infrared astronomy)
- MAST: The Multimission Archive at Space Telescope Science Institute (STSInst)
- ASDC: ASI (Agenzia Spaziale Italiana) Science Data Center
- Wikipedia: Comprehensive list of the major astronomical catalogs
- VSX: The AAVSO’s International variable star index.
- SkyCat: A tool that combines visualization of images and access to catalogs and archive data for astronomy
- TopCat: Tool for Operations on Catalogues and Data – TOPCAT is an interactive graphical viewer and editor for tabular data. Its aim is to provide most of the facilities that astronomers need for analysis and manipulation of source catalogues and other tables, though it can be used for non-astronomical data as well. It understands a number of different astronomically important formats (including FITS and VOTable) and more formats can be added.
- AstroGrid: The doorway to the Virtual Observatory (VO). We provide a suite of desktop applications to enable astronomers to explore and bookmark resources from around the world, find data, store and share files in VOSpace, query databases, plot and manipulate tables, cross-match catalogues, and build and run scripts to automate sequences of tasks.
- SkyView: A Virtual Observatory on the Net generating images of any part of the sky at wavelengths in all regimes from Radio to Gamma-Ray.
- The Extrasolar Planets Encyclopedia: An interactive catalog of all exoplanet discoveries, a compendium of the latest research, and other links.
Mobile Apps
- Variable Stars, an iPhone App containing 183,000+ variable stars based on the aforementioned VSX database.
- Exoplanets, an iPhone-app containing a database of ~520 exoplanets, with some nifty statistical plotting features.
Data Analysis
- R: The R Project for Statistical Computing
- Octave: A high-level language, primarily intended for numerical computations, mostly compatible with Matlab.
- StatisticalConsultants: A list of free statistical software packages
- VStar: VStar is a multi-platform, easy-to-use variable star data visualization and analysis tool that was developed as part of the Citizen Sky project. Data for a star can be read from the AAVSO database or from a text file of your own creation. It will plot the data on a light curve then you can choose to superimpose means data and error bars if you like. VStar can also create phase plots and perform basic period search functions, all of which make it a valuable tool for data analysis.
Visualization
- SAOImage DS9: Astronomical Data Visualization Application
- VisIVO: A visualization interface to the Virtual Observatory.
Database Management Systems (DBMS)
- MySQL: A popular open-source database
- PostgreSQL: Another open-source database system, the main MySQL alternative
- SQLite: SQLite is a software library that implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional SQL database engine.
Data-mining frameworks
- WEKA: Data-mining software in Java
- RapidMiner: The “Community edition” is free and open-source, but requires registration.
- Kaggle.com: A site that hosts data-mining competitions. The platform allows organizations to have their data scrutinized by the world’s best statisticians.
Other software archives and links
- mloss.org: Machine learning open-source software
- mldata.org: The sister-site to mloss.org – contains a repository of machine-learning data sets used for research purposes.
- kdnuggets: software for data-mining, analytics, and knowledge discovery
- SAO TDC: The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Telescope Data Center creates and maintains software to process and archive data from optical telescopes at the Whipple Observatory and MMT Observatory on Mt. Hopkins in Arizona.
The software is freely distributed and documented online. - SATorchi.net: Steve Torchinski’s Radio Astronomy data analysis software links
- CDS developer’s corner: Including CDS client and various VO-related tools
- Togaware: Free data-mining resources
- HEASARC: NASA’s High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center
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