2016/11/28 by Mark Taylor, Taylor, M. B., G. Mantelet +3
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics (astro-ph.IM) #Scientific Research and Discoveries
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1611.09190
openalex publication_date 2016/11/28 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
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.