TOPCAT: Full Tutorial

Hi, I am Satyapriya Das. Currently doing MS in Astronomy and Astrophysics. I work with TOPCAT but while learning, I was never able to find a good tutorial covering the full thing. So I decided I would make a video for others :) TOPCAT is an interactive graphical viewer and editor for tabular data. Its aim is to provide most of the facilities that astronomers need for analysis and manipulation of source catalogues and other tables, though it can be used for non-astronomical data as well. It understands a number of different astronomically important formats (including FITS, VOTable and CDF) and more formats can be added. It is especially good at interactive exploration of large (multi-million row, lots of columns) tables. It offers a variety of ways to view and analyse tables, including a browser for the cell data themselves, viewers for information about table and column metadata, and facilities for sophisticated interactive 1-, 2-, 3- and higher-dimensional visualisation, calculating statistics and joining tables using flexible matching algorithms. Using a powerful and extensible Java-based expression language new columns can be defined and row subsets selected for separate analysis. Table data and metadata can be edited and the resulting modified table can be written out in a wide range of output formats. It is a stand-alone application which works quite happily with no network connection. However, because it uses Virtual Observatory (VO) standards, it can cooperate smoothly with other tools, services and datasets in the VO world and beyond.