TGCat, The Chandra Transmission Grating Catalog and Archive: Systems, Design and Accessibility

TL;DR

TGCat is a dynamic, web-based catalog and archive for Chandra transmission grating data, enabling easy browsing, custom plotting, and bulk downloads, supported by automated data processing and a user-accessible analysis library.

Contribution

It introduces a fully online, automated system for accessing, processing, and analyzing Chandra gratings data with integrated high-level functions and VO support.

Findings

Automated data fetching and processing system

User-friendly web interface with custom plotting

Integration with Virtual Observatory resources

Abstract

The recently released Chandra Transmission Grating Catalog and Archive, TGCat, presents a fully dynamic on-line catalog allowing users to browse and categorize Chandra gratings observations quickly and easily, generate custom plots of resulting response corrected spectra on-line without the need for special software and to download analysis ready products from multiple observations in one convenient operation. TGCat has been registered as a VO resource with the NVO providing direct access to the catalogs interface. The catalog is supported by a back-end designed to automatically fetch newly public data, process, archive and catalog them, At the same time utilizing an advanced queue system integrated into the archive's MySQL database allowing large processing projects to take advantage of an unlimited number of CPUs across a network for rapid completion. A unique feature of the catalog is that all of the high level functions used to retrieve inputs from the Chandra archive and to generate the final data products are available to the user in an ISIS written library with detailed documentation. Here we present a structural overview of the Systems, Design, and Accessibility features of the catalog and archive.