P.9 Venustiano Soancatl Aguilar (University of Groningen)
Visualising Virtual Observatory Data in Digital Planetaria
The Virtual Observatory provides a rich source of material for preparing presentations for the general public in digital planetaria. However, the effort required in preparing the data for display in most planetaria is considerable. The most common software used in domes today (e.g. SkySkan and Digistar) cannot read data from standard astronomical formats. We present plans for a simply interface which will enable the extraction of catalogue data from the Virtual Observatory and its conversion into formats which can be used by the commercial software systems. It is intended to explicitly add this capability into the new open source visualisation system, Openspace. A prototype systems is available and has been used to extract data from the second Gaia data release, the third KiDS data release and fifteenth Sloan Digital Sky Survey data release. The work is complementary to that of the Data2Dome consortium, which concentrates on images and recent events rather than the access to archival catalogues.
