The Sociedad Española de Astronomía (SEA) organized its XIII Scientific Annual Meeting in the city of Salamanca between the 16th and 20th of July 2018. This year the meeting took place at the Hospedería del Colegio Arzobispo Fonseca, as one of the acts taking place within the celebration of the VIII centenary of the Universidad de Salamanca.
Quasar participated in the XIII SEA Meeting with a contribution, and for the first time, as a sponsor of the meeting.
Our poster contribution highlighted the status of our work within the StarFormMapper H2020 project. After two years into the project, we now have a working prototype that is in the process of being deployed at the ESA facilities at ESAC, and is ready for the next phase of the project: to embed the scientific algorithms developed by the scientific team of the project. The title and abstract we presented are found below.
DEAVI, An Added Value Interface for the StarFormMapper H2020 Science Project We present the first version of the Dynamic Evolution Added Value Interface (DEAVI). DEAVI is a new AVI developed by the company Quasar Science Resources for the StarFormMapper (SFM) project. SFM is an international project funded by the European Union under the Horizon 2020 programme. DEAVI will allow the exploitation of the scientific contents of the archive of two of ESA’s space missions, GAIA and Herschel, in particular, the Gaia DR2 Release Catalogue. |
As sponsors of the SEA Meeting we had a stand to show the status and progress of some of our ongoing projects, including the StarFormMapper H2020, MAGMA and Gaia VR projects. The experience was very positive and we received plenty of interest and feedback from the participants of the meeting as well as stablish contacts for future developments and projects.
The second Gaia data release took place on the 25 of April 2018. This release contains the positions and brightness of 1.7 billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy and nearby galaxies, including distance indicators, motions and colour information of 1.3 billion stars. Several resources have been developed to visualise this extraordinary data set, both for public outreach and scientific exploitation purposes. One of these tools is the Virtual Reality Astronomical Data Exploration Tool developed by Quasar. A demo of this tool was given by the Quasar Team (Emanuel Ramirez) at the SEA Meeting (pictures above).
During the SEA meeting, Xavier Luri, assistant professor at the Departament of Quantum Physics and Astrophysics at the University of Barcelona, was interviewed by the Spanish national television and he discussed the VR application Quasar is developing. The interview, with a small sample showing the VR application, can be seen clicking on the image below.
Xavier Luri interview on La 1,Telediario Nacional, 18 Julio 2018