Chinese Virtual Observatory

       During the last two months, China-VO gains new visible progress in the following aspects.

       A preview version of FITS Manager (FM) is completed. FM is the second FITS oriented application from the China-VO. (The first one is FitHAS.) It is a desktop tool for astronomers to manage hundreds or thousands of FITS files hosted in their personal computers. FM provides basic functions of a file explorer, including browse, search and thumbnail preview. Additionally, SAMP interfaces are provides to broadcast selected FITS files to VO applications. FM is a collaborating project with the VO-I.

        Preparation work for WWT based VO and e-Science education and training activities is going on smoothly. The official announcement of “Microsoft Cup, WWT Guided Tours Design Competition” will be available very soon after the IVOA interop. A nationwide astronomy teacher training will be held in early of August. With the help of MSR, a regional cache server has been in place, which will speed up the usage of the WWT in Chinese users.

        From March 17 to May 5, a series of astroinformatics trainings were organized at NAOC. The theme of these trainings is “Information Storage and Management”, taking advantages of one EMC book with the same name. 16 lectures were given by China-VO core team to NAOC graduates. About 200 audiences totally attended the trainings. It is the first experiment, this kind of practical astroinformatics trainings will continue in the next years.