TOPCAT

Tool for OPerations on Catalogues And Tables

Does what you want with tables

Latest (see Version History for details)

Version 3.9 released 27 October 2011
New: Crossmatching enhancements
New asymmetric match selections (good for crowded fields) and ellipse-based match criteria.
New: Usability improvements
Drag columns in Column Window, angle functions in degrees not radians, delete multiple tables, ADQL syntax checking, ...)
New: Web SAMP
SAMP Web Profile is now running by default in the hub launched at startup, alllowing suitable web pages to send data to/from TOPCAT and other tools.

* What is TOPCAT?

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 and VOTable) and more formats can be added.

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 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. Between 2006 and 2009 TOPCAT was developed within the AstroGrid project, and is offered as part of a standard suite of applications on the AstroGrid web site, where you can find information on several other VO tools.

The program is written in pure Java and available under the GNU General Public Licence. It has been developed mostly in the UK within various UK and Euro-VO projects (Starlink, AstroGrid, VOTech, AIDA, GAVO) and under PPARC and STFC grants. Its underlying table processing facilities are provided by the related library STIL.

* Features

The following is a list of the program's main capabilities. The hyperlinks are to the relevant parts of the user document.

Supported table input formats include:

and supported output formats include:

* Documentation

Full tutorial and reference documentation for TOPCAT is provided by SUN/253, the user document. This is available within the program at runtime via the context-sensitive and searchable help system, or in the following forms within the distribution or on the web:

* Frequently Asked Questions

A list of frequently asked questions is available. If you want to suggest additional questions and/or answers, please get in touch.

* Mailing Lists

Two mailing lists for TOPCAT and related software have, since Feb 2010, been set up:

To subscribe, send a message with the Subject line "subscribe topcat-user" or "subscribe topcat-announce" to sympa@sympa.bristol.ac.uk, or use the Subscribe link on the pages linked above. Archives are available from those pages. There is a bit more information on the mailing list page.

If you have queries or support enquiries you are encouraged to send them to topcat-user. However, I'm still happy to answer mail directly to me if you prefer that.

* Screenshots

You can see screenshots of TOPCAT in action in the following places:

* Obtaining TOPCAT

TOPCAT is written in the Java language using the Java 2 Standard Edition version 1.5 and should run on any J2SE 1.5 or more recent system. This means it can be run on a wide range of platforms, without requiring any recompilation - you just need to ensure that you have a suitable Java Runtime Environment (JRE). If you don't have Java installed, or have an unsuitable version, you can obtain it for Linux, Solaris and MS Windows from Sun's web site (you only need the "JRE" rather than the "SDK" download, unless you will be doing development work). J2SE Runtime Enviroments (sometimes called JVM or Java Virtual Machines) for other platforms may be available from operating system vendors; in particular TOPCAT is known to run on MacOS X.

Note Various open-source java implementations (GNU's gij, OpenJDK-based implementations) do not always work well at time of writing - these are sometimes bundled with Linux distributions. If you have one of these (try java -version to find out) and are experiencing trouble with TOPCAT, you are advised to get the Sun implementation instead.

Having got Java, There are several ways to download TOPCAT, described in rough order of advisability in the following subsections. More information on how to run the program having obtained it can be found in SUN/253's section on Invoking TOPCAT.

Standalone Jar File

The most convenient form for downloading is to pick up a single Jar file containing the required classes:

(Note: if you try to download these directly your browser may say something about a failed security check. Make sure that you save it to a file, for instance by right-clicking in Firefox).

On Unix-like operating systems, download one or other of these jar files and the startup script topcat into the same directory, then "chmod +x topcat", and you can just run the command: 

   topcat
On non-Unix systems the script won't work, and you can use a command like: 
   java -jar topcat-*.jar
or invoke it in some other system-dependent way such as by clicking on it.

For many users, topcat-lite will provide all the features they need. The optional extras provided by topcat-full include:

Even topcat-full lacks a few of the niche features (proper coordinate handling in SoG, NDF viewing in hierachy view), since these require native libraries; for these you will need the Full Starjava installation described below.

WebStart

WebStart is a Java technology which enables one-click download, installation, updating and invocation of Java applications over the web. If you have Java's WebStart installed, you can install and invoke TOPCAT in one click from one of the following links:

The first of these can be used for your own data, but will prompt for confirmation with a dire warning that you are running untrusted code (it's OK - trust me!). The second is just a demo with some example tables to play with that will run in a restricted environment, so it can't load or save tables. It also does not permit use of user-defined algebraic expressions to create synthetic columns or subsets; there may be other restrictions too. See the comments in the previous item for the difference between topcat-lite and topcat-full.

MacOS X

If you have a Macintosh, you can pick up the following for easy installation:

topcat-full.dmg (22.3M)
You might like to see this FAQ entry to find out how to set flags for memory usage etc.

Full Starjava Installation

If you want the most comprehensive installation then download and unpack the full starjava tree in one of the following forms:

These archives include related applications such as SPLAT, SoG and Treeview. You can run TOPCAT using the starjava/bin/topcat script (Unix) or by running java -jar starjava/lib/topcat/topcat.jar.

* Version History

The most recent public release of TOPCAT is version 3.9, released 27 October 2011.

For a detailed history of the changes in this and previous releases, see the

Full Version History
section of SUN/253.

Further Information

STILTS
TOPCAT's sister package is STILTS, the STIL Tool Set. STILTS offers many of the same facilities as TOPCAT (and some additional ones) in the form of command-line tools, which can be invoked from the Unix/DOS command-line prompt, or from Jython.
Other Resources relating to the code
Examples and Tutorials

TOPCAT is currently (2012) under active development, and I'm very open to user feedback. Any comments, questions, requests, bugs, job offers etc, please either post to the topcat-user list or contact me direct: