We are pleased to announce that Scisoft 7.1 is now available from the standard ESO Scisoft web pages (www.eso.org/scisoft). This version includes many small updates, new versions of some major packages (IRAF/STSDAS, MIDAS) and also some new items (Funtools, BoA, miniCRUSH, VirGO etc). It is still for Fedora Core 6 (32bit).

The Scisoft 7.1 is available for download from both its original webiste (http://www.eso.org/sci/data-processing/software/scisoft/) and its mirror site in Beijing (http://scisoft.lamost.org).

This version is already installed on most scientific desktops at ESO Garching.

Regards, Richard for the Scisoft Team

Dear all

we are very pleased to announce the release of the AstroGrid Desktop Suite : get it from http://www.astrogrid.org This was time to coincide with the UK National Astronomy meeting, currently happening in Belfast.

After various prototypes over several years, this is the first release we consider a complete set of software and working services. From the user's point of view we are releasing three applications that run on your desktop - VODesktop; Topcat; and AstroGrid Python - and providing links to other Euro-VO tools that interoperate seamlessly - Aladin, VOSpec, SPLAT-VO. We also link to other VO tools - NVO services, VOPlot, etc.

In the background we have operating services - Registry, VOSpace, and Community - in several sites - and we have used our own DSA component to help UK data centres establish working data services. Of course we can see thousands of services worldwide.

The website is aimed purely at end users. Shortly we will also launch related web sites aimed at deployers and developers and casual readers (with names like project.astrogrid.org and deploy.astrogrid.org and develop.astrogriod.org)

Help yourselves, and enjoy !

andy lawrence

Announcement:

VirGO v1.3.1, a Stellarium based 3D visual browsing tool for the ESO Science Archive Facility has been released. See download page and quick start guide:
http://archive.eso.org/cms/virgo/

The annual meeting of Chinese Virtual Observatory was held successfully from November 19 to 21, 2007 in Guangzhou. All talks are available for download at the meeting website:
http://www.china-vo.org/cn/events/cvo07/

On November 8th, Fedora 8 was released by Fedora project. It is available for download locally at:
http://info.bao.ac.cn/download/linux/redhat/fedora/8/