Australia Telescope Online Archive

The last edition of ATNF News (issue 54), included a report on the development of the Australia Telescope Online Archive (ATOA). This is an archive of raw data files, compiled from Compact Array observations taken since 1990. These data can now be directly downloaded via a web interface.

The archive currently provides access to data files recorded on or before 31 December 2004 and will be updated approximately every month. At present the archive is updated by transferring files from Narrabri to Marsfield on DLT tapes. We expect to replace this soon with an automated "trickle" process where data files are directly transferred to the Marsfield disks over the network.

The ATOA was released on 3 December 2004 and should be functional with the browsers Mozilla 1.0+, Firefox 1.0+, Internet Explorer 6, Netscape 7.0+, Konqueror or Safari. Other browsers and versions may also work but are not supported by the ATNF.

So far, good use has been made of the archive with 184 data downloads from 39 different users between the release date and the end of January 2005. This is a significant increase over the previous system when archive requests were received by email and the data provided on CDs.

We request that any publications that make use of ATOA data should acknowledge the ATOA. For appropriate words to use please refer to the web page
www.atnf.csiro.au/research/publications/.

The ATOA is available at the web address www.atnf.csiro.au/atoa . Any comments or fault reports on the use of the archive are most welcome.

Jessica Chapman and Christopher Owen
(Jessica.Chapman@csiro.au , Christopher.Owen@csiro.au)