After great effort of more then one year, the SDSS DR6 datasets ware fully mirrored at National Astronomical Observatories, CAS (NAOC). A mirror website is built at:
http://sdss.lamost.org

The available resources include:

SkyServer BestDR6 (2500GB)
http://skyserver.lamost.org/skyserver/

SkyServer SegueDR6 (500GB)
http://skyserver.lamost.org/segue/

Spectra DR6 (300GB)
http://info.bao.ac.cn/download/astronomy/sdss/data/spectro/

Images DR6 (10TB)
http://sdss.lamost.org/das/DR6/imaging/

During the last few months, the first scientific paper appeared from the China-VO group. Using VO-DAS (VO Data Access Service), Dr. Chao LIU and his colleagues searched Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) DR5 photometric data with 120d< α < 270d, 25d < δ < 70d for new Milky Way companions or substructures in the Galactic halo. Five candidates were identified as over dense faint stellar sources that have color-magnitude diagrams similar to those of known globular clusters, or dwarf spheroidal galaxies. The distance to each candidate was estimated by fitting suitable stellar isochrones to the color-magnitude diagrams. Geometric properties and absolute magnitudes were roughly measured and used to determine whether the candidates are likely dwarf spheroidal galaxies, stellar clusters, or tidal debris. This work has been publishes in A&A as "2008A&A...477..139L". "This is an important milestone for the China-VO," Prof. Yongheng ZHAO said, "which demonstrates the VO-DAS is useful and practical for astronomers."

Phase I of the China-VO had been completed by the end of 2007 officially. A comprehensive summary for the China-VO phase I will be released soon. The China-VO will step its Phase II from 2008 to 2010 if we can get funding as planned. During the second phase, we will collaborate with LAMOST project more closely. Design and development of LAMOST scientific archive management system is taken by the China-VO. We will try to make the LAMOST archives VO-ready, providing interfaces for VO-DAS and other VO data access applications. Additionally, the China-VO will provide support to LAMOST in software development, data mining, user support, and other fields.

A new version of FitHAS (FITS Header Archiving Service) was release in last December. Keyword records from primary header units of 1.2 million SDSS DR6 1-d spectra FITS files ware imported into a MySQL database successfully. The software package is available for download at: http://services.china-vo.org/fithas/

FitHAS is an easy-to-use assistant tool for FITS header archiving, which is developed by Chinese Virtual Observatory (China-VO) team and IBM Center of Tianjin University. The tool provides graphic interface and wizard guiding an archive manager or data provider to extract header information from one or more FITS files (*.fit, *.fits, *.fit.gz, *.fits.gz) and import it to a table.

Please visit here for more information.

The China-VO group got good news this month when SkyMouse received critical government funding. A three-year, RMB270,000 award to the China-VO team is announced by the National Science Foundation China recently. The funding will provide strong support to the development of SkyMouse system.

SkyMouse is a smart system developed by Chinese Virtual Observatory project to let you access different online resource systems easily then ever. Not like some VO efforts on uniformed access systems, for example, NVO DataScope, SkyMouse tries to show a comprehensive overview for a specific object, but not to snatch as much data as possible.

Stimulated by a simple “Mouse Over” on an interested object name, various VO-compliant and traditional databases, i.e. SIMBAD, NED, VizieR, DSS, ADS, are queried by the SkyMouse. An overview for the given object, including basic information, image, observation and references, is displayed in user’s default web browser.

Please log on to the website of SkyMouse for more information about the system.

Chinese Virtual Observatory annual meeting for the year (China-VO 2005) was held successfully at Shandong University at Weihai from November 25th to 27th. About 30 representatives from National Astronomical Observatories, Beijing Normal Univ., Central China Normal Univ., CNIC CAS, Tianjin Univ., Yunnan Univ. and Shandong Univ. at Weihai, attended the meeting. 20 talks were presented on all VO related fields, esp. on China-VO R&D. All related materials about the meeting including slides, pictures and other documents will be available at the meeting website soon.

For more information please visit: http://www.china-vo.org/cn/events/cvo05/

With the help of China-VO, BATC catalogs are available now at the CDS system, both in FTP categories and VizieR database. It is probably the largest dataset so far that our Chinese astronomers contribute to the international community.

BATC means Beijing-Arizona-Taiwan-Connecticut, which is a multi-color sky survey project conducted in National Astronomical Observatory of China (NAOC). The telescope used by the project is a 60/90cm f/3 Schmidt telescope located at Xinglong Station of NAOC. The filter system includes 15 intermediate band filters, covering a range in optical wavelengths from 300 to 1000 nm. A Ford Aerospace 2048×2048 CCD camera with 15 micron pixel size is mounted at the Schmidt focus of the telescope. The field of view of the CCD is 58'*58' with a plate scale of 1.7 arcsec per pixel. From 1995 to 2004, 110 58'x58' sky survey fields have been observed. First release of the BATC catalog includes observation results for 511842 sources located in 70 sky survey fields. The total data amount is about 130MB.

The main query interface is here.

The cover page for the catalog is: http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/qcat?II/262

The FTP address is: ftp://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/cats/II/262/ and http://badc.lamost.org/archives/BATC/catalog/

Homepage of BATC: http://batc.bao.ac.cn

The internal training of China-VO group has completed successfully on Mar 18, 2005 in the National Astronomical Observatory. All the postgraduates in the China-VO group attended the study. The study has been divided into three parts. First of all, we studied some IVOA standards and protocols, therefore we have got full understanding of the development blueprint of the IVOA. After that we tested the prototype of Astrogrid and some demos of AVO. Unfortunately, the new release of astrogrid will not be available until Mar 31, 2005, so several services are temporarily unavailable. Thirdly, we concentrated on the installation of GT4 and how to use WSRF to write service.

All attendees said they learned a lot from this concentrated study. They hope China-VO group will arrange more in the future.

Dr. Cui chenzhou, the leader of China-VO group, said it is likely that a further study of IVOA will be convened soon.

Chinese Virtual Observatory (China-VO) project was initiated by National Astronomical Observatories of China (NAOC) in 2002. The China-VO focuses its main effort on IVOA Standard Implementation and Application Services. The R&D focuses mainly include 5 fields: China-VO platform construction, transparent data access service for national and international astronomical data, legacy astronomical application integration, astronomical instrument integration, and VO-based astronomy education.

On Aug 4 2004, the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC) announced their decision to the China-VO project. The project, "Research and Development of Chinese Virtual Observatory Testbed", will be funded by a three-year, one million RMB grant from July 2004 to June 2007. The mainly goals of the project include "an operational China-VO platform based on Grid" and "uniform data access service supporting IVOA standard interfaces".

The first major discovery to be made with the Virtual Observatory was announced today to the press.

The AVO science team discovered thirty-one previously undetected powerful supermassive black holes in the so-called GOODS (Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey) fields. The paper describing these results will be published in an upcoming issue of Astronomy & Astrophysics.

• ESA Press Release
• ESO Press Release

VOTFilter is an XML filter for OpenOffice Calc developed by Chinese Virtual Observatory (China-VO) consortium. Using the filter, you can read/write files in VOTable format, edit and analyze VOTable data using OpenOffice Calc. It's a fully integrated package tool, you need not know anything about JAVA programming.

The second release candidate of 1.0 version is available for download from: http://services.china-vo.org/vofilter/

"VOTFilter", an XML filter, lets you read and write VOTable files using OpenOffice.org Calc.

The "VOTFilter" is under heavy developing in China-VO project. As the first step, we finished an import filter. With it, you can load VOTable files into OpenOffice.org Calc.

In the near future, an output filter will be developed and "binary and FITS" format VOTable file will be supported.

On 25-25 September 2003, the second national China-VO technical meeting was held at National Astronomical Observatory of China (NAOC). Representatives from NAOC, YunNan Observatory, Tsinghua Univ., Peking Univ., Nanjing Univ., Central China Normal Univ., Beijing Normal Univ., Beijing Planetarium, Computer Network Information Center CAS, and other related organizations participated this meeting.

The latest technical and scientific progresses on VO from China-VO partners were reported. In the meeting, attendees discussed many topics on the development of the China-VO: pros and cons of the China-VO, R&D focuses, education and outreach, demos design, collaboration among astronomical organizations, collaboration between astronomers and IT experts, etc. Consensuses were reached on building a GT3 based testbed, designing more demos, setting up a national China-VO work group.

The meeting would act as an important milestone for the China-VO. The R&D of the China-VO will speed up since the meeting.

In the morning, senior members of the China-VO (Yongheng ZHAO, Chenzhou CUI) and the AIRE (Jianfeng ZHOU, Rui QI) discussed how to enhance the cooperation between the projects at NAOC.

They came to the consensus that funding and personnel of the two projects were limited, and it was necessary to joint together to accelerate the R&D of VO in China.

Based on the GT3 alpha, "Hello China-VO", the first Grid service of mine, is completed, which is a little program just for testing. Its function is very simple, to return the inputted string or to act as a counter.

From October 23 to 24, during two days meeting at Shanghai Supercomputing Center, China National Grid (CNGrid) consortium and China Grid Forum were established.

China government will invest 100 million RMB, about 12 M USD, to build the infrastructure of CNGrid including two primary nodes, eight ordinary nodes and several applications.

Virtual Observatory, as an implementation of Scientific Data Grid, is supported in the great project.

Accompanied by Peng Liu, the winner of PennySort 2002, Jim Gray visited National Astronomical Observatory in the morning on October 17. Jim's trip of China is for Microsoft conference: "Computing in the 21st Century".

First, Yongheng Zhao, project manager of China-VO, gave an introduction of LAMOST to Jim in project showroom. From 10:00 to 11:00, Jim gave a public talk, "Building the Worldwide Telescope". More than one hundred people presented including staff of NAOC and many guests from other institutes.

After public talk, we had a discussion. First, Chenzhou Cui introduced some condition of Beijing Astronomical Data Center (BADC) and gave out our ideas on China-VO and VO-oriented LAMOST. Then, We discussed some technical questions about database, HTM and .NET. Astronomers and computer scientists from NAOC, PKU and Tsinghua Univ. attended the discussion. In the end, we gained consensus on cooperation.

After lunch, Jim left NAOC for tourism to Great Wall.

ZYH gave an introduction of China-VO, focusing on the requirement of supercomputing and grid. CXB gave some suggestions about the requirement and introduced the SCCAS. Some technical details about grid and cross identification were discussed. SCCAS experts were very interested in the scientific goals of China-VO.

China-VO has good requirement and SCCAS can provide technical support. China-VO will be an excellent scientific application for their SC and grid. It is a win-win cooperation.

Major content:
1. ZYH introduced the layered architecture of China-VO. At the beginning, China-VO will be comprised of 3 layers at least: DBMS, Grid and Portal. If possible, an analysing/processing layer will exist between DBMS and Grid layers.
Linux OS will be the mainly used platform. XML, OGSA and Java will act as key roles in the layered architecture.

2. Principal of each layer is determined.
DBMS : SJ (MySQL, XML)
GRID : CCZ (Globus Toolkit, OGSA, Web Services, XML)
Portal : SHJ (Java, JSP, XML)
Analysing/Processing toolkit: ZGH (C++, Java)

3. Charts and Catalogs involved in China-VO demo:
Charts: DSS, DSSII, SDSS, ROSAT, 2MASS, NVSS, MYSS
Catalogs: USNO-A2.0, SDSS, ROSAT, 2MASS, IRSA, NVSS, FIRST, GB6, MYSS

4. Roadmap for China-VO
0209-0210: Requirement Analyse
0210-0211: Scheme Discussion
0211-0303: Scheme Implementation and Optimization
0303-0305: China-VO Initial Demo
0305-0307: Demo Optimization

Chu Yaoquan from Project Science Division, attended a meeting on “Virtual Observatory of the Future” in Caltch, USA.

Virtual Observatory is consistent by tens of large astronomical databases distributed in different countries, and users can use these data through a high speed internet. “National Virtual Observatory”(NVO) was listed as the first project in the “Astronomy and Astrophysics in the New Millennium”of USA.

Nearly 140 astronomers all over the world attended the meeting. Three related main research subjects, i.e. formation and evolution of the large scale structure in the Universe, spectroscopic studies of the objects from the multi-band surveys, and the structure of the galaxies were discussed. These three subjects are happened to be the key subjects of the LAMOST project.

Astronomy will enter a new era, and its research methods will be changed as well. Both LAMOST project and Chinese astronomical community should pay more attention to the training of young astronomers to follow up this new research mode.