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Not familiar with the
Astronomical Data Center? Here is some basic information about
the ADC.
Do you still have questions? See the ADC FAQ, our How To page , or send us your question
using our feedback form.
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What is the ADC?
The Astronomical Data Center ADC is an element of the Space Sciences Directorate at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, located in Greenbelt, Maryland, U.S.A., near Washington, D.C. We are part of the Astrophysics Data Facility of the Space Science Data Operations Office. We work with collections of astronomical data and provide data services the scientific community. The ADC received guidance from a scientific steering committee made up of representatives of the astronomical research community.
What type of stuff can I find here?The Astronomical Data Center specializes in archiving and distributing collections of data that have been published by professional astronomers. Most of these data sets are in the form of computer-readable tables of numbers, rather than images. These are often known as astronomical catalogs. Tables published in the professional journals are simply called journal tables.
How do I get to the data files?The ADC World Wide Web site provides a number of ways to explore the Center's data collection. Users can search descriptive text for all data sets, browse lists of titles, or look up data sets by the authors names. A good place to begin is our Science Data page.
Once a data set of interest has been found, users can view, subset, sort and download the data and documentation. The ADC Data Viewer and ADC's mirror of the VizieR service are useful tools for these purposes. From the Data Viewer, ADC users can make use of our CatsEye service to plot the data on-line.
The data sets are in anonymous FTP directories. Data files in the public archives can also be directly downloaded from our FTP site. The top level of the ADC's public FTP site is on adc.astro.umd.edu in the directory /pub/adc. The data files can be found in the sub-directory /archives. This sub-directory is divided into sub-directories for the ADC's two main data categories: larger astronomical catalogs (/catalogs), and tables from scientific journals (/journal_tables).
We also have sets of catalogs available on CD-ROM.
To find out how to get data on CD-ROM or other media, see ADC Data on CD-ROMs & Other
Media.
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