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This paper presents generic guidelines for constructing customised workflows exploiting game engine technologies aimed at allowing scientists to navigate and interact with their own virtual environments. We have deployed Unity which is a cross-platform game engine freely available for educational and research purposes. Our guidelines are applicable to both onshore and offshore areas (either separately or even merged together) reconstructed from a variety of input datasets such as digital terrains, bathymetric and structure from motion models, and starting from either freely available sources or ad-hoc produced datasets. The deployed datasets are characterised by a wide range of resolutions, ranging from a couple of hundreds of meters down to single centimetres. We outline realisations of workflows creating virtual scenes starting not only from digital elevation models, but also real 3D models as derived from structure from motion techniques e.g. in the form of OBJ or COLLADA. Our guidelines can be knowledge transferred to other scientific domains to support virtual reality exploration, e.g. 3D models in archaeology or digital elevation models in astroplanetary sciences.

This paper presents generic guidelines for constructing customised workflows exploiting game engine technologies aimed at allowing scientists to navigate and interact with their own virtual environments. We have deployed Unity which is a cross-platform game engine freely available for educational and research purposes. Our guidelines are applicable to both onshore and offshore areas (either separately or even merged together) reconstructed from a variety of input datasets such as digital terrains, bathymetric and structure from motion models, and starting from either freely available sources or ad-hoc produced datasets. The deployed datasets are characterised by a wide range of resolutions, ranging from a couple of hundreds of meters down to single centimetres. We outline realisations of workflows creating virtual scenes starting not only from digital elevation models, but also real 3D models as derived from structure from motion techniques e.g. in the form of OBJ or COLLADA. Our guidelines can be knowledge transferred to other scientific domains to support virtual reality exploration, e.g. 3D models in archaeology or digital elevation models in astroplanetary sciences.

The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) will be the world's largest and most sensitive radio observatory ever built. SKA is currently completing the pre-construction phase before initiating mass construction phase 1, in which two arrays of radio antennas - SKA1-Mid and SKA1-Low - will be installed in the South Africa's Karoo region and Western Australia's Murchinson Shire, each covering a different range of radio frequencies. The SKA1-Mid array comprises 130 15-m diameter dish antennas observing in the 350 MHz-14 GHz range and will be remotely orchestrated by the SKA Telescope Manager (TM) system. To enable onsite and remote operations each dish will be equipped with a Local Monitoring and Control (LMC) system responsible to directly manage and coordinate antenna instrumentation and subsystems, providing a rolled-up monitoring view and high-level control to TM. This paper gives a status update of the antenna instrumentation and control software design and provides details on the LMC software prototype being developed., Proceedings of the 16th Int. Conf. on Accelerator and Large Experimental Control Systems, ICALEPCS2017, Barcelona, Spain

Workflow and science gateway technologies have been adopted by scientific communities as a valuable tool to carry out complex experiments. They cover the possibility to perform computations for data analysis and simulations, whereas hiding details of the complex infrastructures underneath. In this paper we describe our experiences in creating workflows oriented science gateways based on gUSE/WS-PGRADE technology that allow to build user–friendly science gateways for Astronomers.

https://www.media.inaf.it/2017/07/27/herschel-la-carica-dei-101mila/ Hi-GAL (Herschel InfraRed Galactic Plane Survey) is a large-scale survey of the Galactic plane, performed with Herschel in five infrared continuum bands between 70 and 500 μm. We present a band-merged catalogue of spatially matched sources and their properties derived from fits to the spectral energy distributions (SEDs) and heliocentric distances, based on the photometric catalogues presented in Molinari et al., covering the portion of Galactic plane -71.0° < ℓ < 67.0°. The band-merged catalogue contains 100 922 sources with a regular SED, 24 584 of which show a 70-μm counterpart and are thus considered protostellar, while the remainder are considered starless. Thanks to this huge number of sources, we are able to carry out a preliminary analysis of early stages of star formation, identifying the conditions that characterize different evolutionary phases on a statistically significant basis. We calculate surface densities to investigate the gravitational stability of clumps and their potential to form massive stars. We also explore evolutionary status metrics such as the dust temperature, luminosity and bolometric temperature, finding that these are higher in protostellar sources compared to pre-stellar ones. The surface density of sources follows an increasing trend as they evolve from pre-stellar to protostellar, but then it is found to decrease again in the majority of the most evolved clumps. Finally, we study the physical parameters of sources with respect to Galactic longitude and the association with spiral arms, finding only minor or no differences between the average evolutionary status of sources in the fourth and first Galactic quadrants, or between 'on-arm' and 'interarm' positions.

Nowadays, collaborative applications are valuable tools for scientists to share their studies and experiences, for example, by interacting simultaneously with their data and outcomes giving feedback to other colleagues on how the data are processed. This paper presents a mobile application connected to a workflow-enabled framework to perform visualization and data analysis of large-scale, multi-dimensional datasets on distributed computing infrastructures. In particular, the usage of workflow-driven applications, through science gateway technologies, allows the scientist to share heavy data exploration tasks as workflows and the relative results in a transparent and user-friendly way.

The Square Kilometer Array (SKA) project aims at building the world's largest radio observatory to observe the radio sky with unprecedented sensitivity and collecting area. In the SKA1 phase of the project, two dish arrays are to be built, one in South Africa (SKA1-Mid) and the other in Western Australia (SKA1-Survey). Each antenna will be provided with a local monitor and control system, enabling remote operations to engineers and to the Telescope Manager system. In this paper we present the current status of the software system being designed to monitor and control the dish subsystem. An overview of the dish instrumentation is reported, along with details concerning the software architecture, functional interfaces, prototyping and the evaluated technologies., Proceedings of the 15th Int. Conf. on Accelerator and Large Experimental Physics Control Systems, ICALEPCS2015, Melbourne, Australia

The availability of large-scale digital surveys offers tremendous opportunities for advancing scientific knowledge in the astrophysics community. Nevertheless, the analysis of these data often requires very powerful computational resources. Science gateway technologies offer Web-based environments to run applications with little concern for learning and managing the underlying infrastructures that execute them. This paper focuses on the issues related to the development of a science gateway customized for the needs of the astrophysics community. The VisIVO Science Gateway is wrapped around a WS-PGRADE/grid User Support Environment portal integrating services for processing and visualizing large-scale multidimensional astrophysical data sets on distributed computing infrastructures. We discuss the core tools and services supported including an application for mobile access to the gateway. We report our experiences in supporting specialized astrophysical communities requiring development of complex workflows for visualization and numerical simulations. Further, available platforms are discussed for sharing workflows in collaborative environments. Finally, we outline our vision for creating a federation of science gateways to benefit astrophysical communities by sharing a set of services for authentication, computing infrastructure access and data/workflow repositories.

The main goal of the Gaia ESA mission is the production of a 5 parameters astrometric catalog - i.e. including positions, parallaxes and the two components of the proper motions - of about 1 billion stars of our Galaxy at an accuracy level going from the few micro-arcseconds of the brightest objects to some ~100 micro-arcseconds of the faintests. This goal will be reached by means of high-precision astrometric measurements conducted by a satellite sweeping continuously the celestial sphere during its 5-years mission.A fundamental step toward the realization of this catalog is the so-called ''Sphere Reconstruction'', which determines the celestial reference frame using the observations of a subset of up to 100 million ''primary stars'' among those observed by Gaia.From a mathematical point of view, these observations translate into a large number of equations, linearized with respect to the unknown parameters around known initial values, whose solution in the least-squares sense eventually provides the catalog with its errors, and determines the Gaia reference frame.This represents an extremely challenging problem because of the high accuracy of the observations and of the large number of unknowns involved. The former issue implies that an adequately accurate relativistic astrometric model has to be used, while the huge number of unknowns and observations puts this task at the forefront of the High-Performance Computing problems.These challenges, and the absolute character of the Gaia measurements and results, calls for a careful scientific validation of the sphere reconstruction, as it was done for the previous HIPPARCOS mission. For these reasons the Gaia Data Processing and Analysis Consortium (DPAC) decided to replicate the baseline process, named AGIS (Astrometric Global Iterative Solution) with another independent solution, named GSR (Global Sphere Reconstruction) which uses a different astrometric model and different algorithms for the system solution.This talk will show the goals of GSR, describing its implementation, its results for complete sphere reconstructions and its first tests with real data.

SpaceMission is a mobile application (iOS) offering hands-on experience of astrophysical concepts using scientific simulations. The application exploits VisIVO, a suite of software tools for visual discovery and exploration of large-scale astrophysical datasets

The VIALACTEA project aims at building a predictive model of star formation in our galaxy. We present the innovative integrated framework and the main technologies and methodologies to reach this ambitious goal., Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems XXV. Proceedings of a Conference held from October 25th to 30th, 2015 at Rydges World Square in Sydney, Australia