TOPCAT for working with catalogues (Colloquium: Mark Taylor, University of Bristol)

© Mark Taylor

TOPCAT is an interactive desktop application for working with astronomical table data such as source catalogues. It has been under active development since 2003, and is now in use by thousands of astronomers worldwide, from project students to Project Scientists, for accessing, analysing, manipulating and preparing catalogue data in many fields of astronomy. In this talk I will give an overview of its capabilities, including visualisation, row selection, crossmatching and Virtual Observatory integration. I will also run through some live demonstrations of using the software to extract scientific results from available data.