Announcing ESASky 5.0: Access to VizieR and all Data Centres in the VIRTUAL OBSERVATORY TAP Registry!

We are excited to announce the latest release of ESASky, version 5.0, on 2 March 2023. This new version extends the External Data Centres feature of the tool to provide access to the VizieR Astronomical Catalogue Service from the Strasbourg Astronomical Data Centre (CDS) and to provide access to all data centres registered in the Virtual Observatory (VO) Table Access Protocol (TAP) Registry. TAP table data and column metadata can now be loaded in ESASky with just a few clicks, and for the first time in ESASky, the Astronomical Data Query Language (ADQL) can be used to query TAP tables. 

The ability to load catalogues from VizieR into ESASky has been a long-term request from ESASky users, and one that we are happy to now fulfill! To find the feature, click on the External Data Centres button and select the VizieR tab: .

Additionally, users can search and load data from any TAP registered in the VO. To find this feature, click on the External Data Centres button and select the TAP Registry tab: .

This feature provides access to many Data Centres not previously included in ESASky, including VizieR (as mentioned above), NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive (IRSA), the German Astrophysical Virtual Observatory (GAVO) Data Centre, the Javalambre-Photometric Local Universe Survey (J-PLUS) and all tables within the ESA Archive TAPs from: Gaia, XMM-Newton, the James Webb Space Telescope, the Hubble Space Telescope, Herschel, ISO, INTEGRAL, the Planetary Science Archive, and all tables in the ESASky TAP and the ESASky Legacy TAP (which contains data from ESA Legacy missions such as Hipparcos, Cos-B, CoRoT, and a selection of EU funded projects using ESA data).

The previously included Data Centres in ESASky from the European Southern Observatory (ESO), the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC), the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST), the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC) and the Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy (ASTRON) continue to be accessible via the Dashboard tab and also via the TAP Registry tab. Any other TAP with an ObsCore table can also be added to the dashboard.

More information on how to use the latest features can be found in the ESASky interface documentation and see the video below.

We hope you enjoy the latest release!