The Planetary Virtual Observatory and Laboratory (PVOL) and its integration into the Virtual European Solar and Planetary Access (VESPA)

TL;DR

The PVOL and VESPA integration enhances access to a comprehensive, searchable database of amateur planetary observations, supporting scientific research and community involvement across multiple celestial objects.

Contribution

This work upgrades PVOL into PVOL2, expanding its scope, functionality, and integration into VESPA, enabling advanced search and long-term data storage for amateur observations.

Findings

Database now includes observations of Mercury, Venus, Mars, Moon, and satellites.

PVOL2 provides a fully functional search engine and web service.

Contains about 30,000 amateur observations from 2000 onward.

Abstract

Since 2003 the Planetary Virtual Observatory and Laboratory (PVOL) has been storing and serving publicly through its web site a large database of amateur observations of the Giant Planets (Hueso et al., 2010a). These images are used for scientific research of the atmospheric dynamics and cloud structure on these planets and constitute a powerful resource to address time changing phenomena in their atmospheres. Advances over the last decade in observation techniques, and a wider conscience by professional astronomers of the quality of amateur observations, have resulted in the necessity to upgrade this database. We here present major advances in the PVOL database that has evolved into a full virtual planetary observatory encompassing also observations of Mercury, Venus, Mars, the Moon and the Galilean satellites. Besides the new objects, the images can be tagged and the database allows simple and complex searches over the data. The new web service: PVOL2 is available online in http://pvol2.ehu.eus/ , contains a fully functional search engine and constitutes one of the many services included in VESPA (Virtual Europan Solar and Planetary Access). Data from PVOL2 can be served from the VESPA portal using the EPN-TAP protocol. PVOL2 also provides long-term storage to amateur observations containing about 30,000 amateur observations starting in the year 2000. Current and past observations from the amateur community provide a global view of the Solar System planets over the years with several possibilities for scientific analysis and amateur astronomers involvement in planetary science.