arXiv subjects

M. B. Taylor

Publications and source records attributed to M. B. Taylor.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2025

Euclid Quick Data Release (Q1). The active galaxies of Euclid

We present a catalogue of candidate active galactic nuclei (AGN) in the $Euclid$ Quick Release (Q1) fields. For each $Euclid$ source we collect multi-wavelength photometry and spectroscopy information from Galaxy Evolution Explorer (GALEX), $Gaia$, Dark Energy Survey (DES), Wise-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), $Spitzer$, Dark Energy Survey (DESI), and Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), including spectroscopic redshift from public compilations. We investigate the AGN contents of the Q1 fields by applying selection criteria using $Euclid$ colours and WISE-AllWISE cuts finding respectively 292,222 and 65,131 candidates. We also create a high-purity QSO catalogue based on $Gaia$ DR3 information containing 1971 candidates. Furthermore, we utilise the collected spectroscopic information from DESI to perform broad-line and narrow-line AGN selections, leading to a total of 4392 AGN candidates in the Q1 field. We investigate and refine the Q1 probabilistic random forest QSO population, selecting a total of 180,666 candidates. Additionally, we perform SED fitting on a subset of sources with available $z_{\text{spec}}$, and by utilizing the derived AGN fraction, we identify a total of 7766 AGN candidates. We discuss purity and completeness of the selections and define two new colour selection criteria ($JH$_$I_{\text{E}}Y$ and $I_{\text{E}}H$_$gz$) to improve on purity, finding 313,714 and 267,513 candidates respectively in the Q1 data. We find a total of 229,779 AGN candidates equivalent to an AGN surface density of 3641 deg$^{-2}$ for $18<I_{\text{E}}\leq 24.5$, and a subsample of 30,422 candidates corresponding to an AGN surface density of 482 deg$^{-2}$ when limiting the depth to $18<I_{\text{E}}\leq 22$. The surface density of AGN recovered from this work is in line with predictions based on the AGN X-ray luminosity functions.

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arXiv2019

Web SAMP and HTTPS: What to do?

SAMP, the Simple Application Messaging Protocol, is a standard developed within the Virtual Observatory to allow communication between different software items on the desktop. One popular usage scenario has been enabling one-click transmission of a table or FITS image from a web page, typically an archive search result of some kind, to a desktop application such as TOPCAT, Aladin or ds9. This has worked well for HTTP web pages since the introduction of the SAMP Web Profile in SAMP 1.3, but the Web Profile will not work over HTTPS, which is increasingly being adopted by data providers. This paper presents a summary of the problem and explores some possible ways forward, for which working prototypes have been developed: specify a new HTTPS-capable Profile, use a SAMP-capable helper application, or abandon using SAMP over HTTPS.

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arXiv2017

Gaia Data Release 1: The archive visualisation service

Context: The first Gaia data release (DR1) delivered a catalogue of astrometry and photometry for over a billion astronomical sources. Within the panoply of methods used for data exploration, visualisation is often the starting point and even the guiding reference for scientific thought. However, this is a volume of data that cannot be efficiently explored using traditional tools, techniques, and habits. Aims: We aim to provide a global visual exploration service for the Gaia archive, something that is not possible out of the box for most people. The service has two main goals. The first is to provide a software platform for interactive visual exploration of the archive contents, using common personal computers and mobile devices available to most users. The second aim is to produce intelligible and appealing visual representations of the enormous information content of the archive. Methods: The interactive exploration service follows a client-server design. The server runs close to the data, at the archive, and is responsible for hiding as far as possible the complexity and volume of the Gaia data from the client. This is achieved by serving visual detail on demand. Levels of detail are pre-computed using data aggregation and subsampling techniques. For DR1, the client is a web application that provides an interactive multi-panel visualisation workspace as well as a graphical user interface. Results: The Gaia archive Visualisation Service offers a web-based multi-panel interactive visualisation desktop in a browser tab. It currently provides highly configurable 1D histograms and 2D scatter plots of Gaia DR1 and the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution (TGAS) with linked views. An innovative feature is the creation of ADQL queries from visually defined regions in plots. [abridged]

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arXiv2016

All of the Sky: HEALPix Density Maps of Gaia-scale Datasets from the Database to the Desktop

The Gaia Archive provides access to observations of around a billion sky sources. The primary access to this archive is via TAP services such as GACS and ARI-Gaia, which allow execution of SQL-like queries against a large remote database returning a result set of manageable size for client-side use. Such services are generally used for extracting relatively small source lists according to potentially complex selection criteria. But they can also be used to obtain statistical information about all, or a large fraction of, the observed sources by building histogram-like results. We examine here the practicalities of producing and consuming all-sky HEALPix weighted density maps in this way for Gaia and other large datasets. We present some modest requirements on TAP/RDBMS services to enable such queries, and discuss visualisation and serialization options for the results including some new capabilities in recent versions of TOPCAT.

astro-ph.IM↗

arXiv2015

SAMP, the Simple Application Messaging Protocol: Letting applications talk to each other

SAMP, the Simple Application Messaging Protocol, is a hub-based communication standard for the exchange of data and control between participating client applications. It has been developed within the context of the Virtual Observatory with the aim of enabling specialised data analysis tools to cooperate as a loosely integrated suite, and is now in use by many and varied desktop and web-based applications dealing with astronomical data. This paper reviews the requirements and design principles that led to SAMP's specification, provides a high-level description of the protocol, and discusses some of its common and possible future usage patterns, with particular attention to those factors that have aided its success in practice.

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arXiv2014

External Use of TOPCAT's Plotting Library

The table analysis application TOPCAT uses a custom Java plotting library for highly configurable high-performance interactive or exported visualisations in two and three dimensions. We present here a variety of ways for end users or application developers to make use of this library outside of the TOPCAT application: via the command-line suite STILTS or its Jython variant JyStilts, via a traditional Java API, or by programmatically assigning values to a set of parameters in java code or using some form of inter-process communication. The library has been built with large datasets in mind; interactive plots scale well up to several million points, and static output to standard graphics formats is possible for unlimited sized input data.

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