Welcome to the Vatican Observatory Data Archives!
Vatican Observatory Data Archives
A great amount of valuable information is stored in the photographic archives of the Specola Vaticana.
The process of digitization of the plates has been started and is well under way. Currently all the plates of the
Vatican Schmidt Telescope have been scanned.
Archive Census
The followign table gives the contents of the Specola Vaticana archive. The plates of the astrograph
are from its historical location in Rome, while the Schmidt telescope plates were taken at Castlegandolfo.
The archive is well preserved and ordered from the very first plate. For every plate of the Carte du Ciel and
of the Astrographic Catalogue, there is a detailed description of the characteristics, the plate constants to
do the astrometry, and information concerning exposure time and weather conditions.
| Instrument | Period | Project, No. Plates and Plate Dimensions |
|---|---|---|
| 33 cm photographic doublet | 1894-1953 |
Carte du Ciel: 540 plates Astrographic Catalogue: 1148 plates (16x16 cm) |
| 40 cm Zeiss Refractor quadruplet | 1935-1974 |
Direct images: 380 plates (30x30 cm) Direct images + spectra: 3111 plates (18x24 cm) Direct images: 1245 plates (13x18 cm) |
| 60 cm Zeiss Reflector | 1935-1974 |
Direct images: 924 plates (9x12 cm) Direct images: 145 plates (7x9 cm) Direct images: 172 plates (6x9 cm) |
| 65 cm Schmidt Telescope | 1957-1986 |
Direct images: 794 plates (20x20 cm) Objective Prism: 1326 plates (20x20 cm) Polarimeter: 30 plates (20x20 cm) |
Digitization of the Plates The plates are being scanned at the Vatican Observatory, Castle Gandolfo, by Alessandro Omizzolo.
Virtual Observatory Standards
The database as well as the images are made available using IVOA(International Virtual Observatory Alliance) standards. In particular we have implemented the SIAP (v 1.01) protocol. This specification defines a protocol for retriving image data from a variety of astronomical image repositories through a uniform interface. Our images are available in FITS(image/fits) and jpeg(image/jpeg) format. We also make available in our database an HTML writeup on each image (text/html). The XML METADATA for our SIAP service is available here.
You can access the SIAP service through an IVOA SIAP compliant client. We have provided a frontend HTML client to access the SIAP service. It returns the data either in XML or as an HTML table.
Astrometry
The Astrometry of the plates has been calculated mainly by Astrometry.net.
Some images did not solve, and we have used Doug Mink's imwcs.
We also acknowledg the use of the WCSTools and
cfitsio routines. The Schmidt direct images were first scaled
to a quarter of its size using imcopy, and then solved for its astrometry. The astrometry was calculated at the
Vatican Observatory Research Group (VORG) at Steward Observatory, Tucson, USA.
FITS DATA
The FITS image data available on the database for the Schmidt telescope are the scaled down images of the original FITS files. The scaled down images are about 18-20 Mb, while the original FITS files are close to 300 Mb. Due to bandwidth restrictions, the original files are not made available publicly. However, they will be made available on request. If you need to download any of the original FITS files, please send an email to ritchiedsouza_yahoo_dot_com, detailing the plate number you want.
Acknowledgment
If you do use any of the plate archive for any publication, please acknowledge the use of the Vatican Observatory Data Archives. Also please send us a link to the publication, so that we can include it in our lists of publications which have been derived from the Vatican Observatory Data Archives.