VizieR FAQ

you can see the last updates here


The CDS/ESRIN service for astronomical catalogues is the result of a joint effort of CDS.home (Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg) and ESA-ESRIN (Information Systems Division) in order to provide the astronomical community with a dedicated tool for retrieving astronomical data listed in published catalogues and tables.

The CDS has a long tradition of collecting, and documenting, published astronomical catalogues and tables in close cooperation with a worldwide network of astronomy data centers. Agreements with Editors of major astronomical journals have helped, more recently, to organize early access to the data tables associated to published articles.

The ESA-ESRIN ISD has led in 1995 the Catalog Browser facility which included the development of the functionalities of a catalogue browser, together with scientific applications, in order to serve the astronomy and space physics communities in Europe.

This service is maintained by CDS, as a service deeply integrated with the other services already available at CDS (including the SIMBAD database and the abstract service for Astronomy & Astrophysics, PASP, New Astronomy, or still in development (the ALADIN interactive deep sky atlas).

In June 1997, a new interface to the Catalogues was developed at CDS, based on the ASU protocol shared by several astronomical institutes, and on a set of META tables describing the catalogues and tables.


The 8 August 1997 upgrade introduced a possiblity of presenting the results in a decreasing order, and of queries in a rectangular box of coordinates.


The 12 September 1997 upgrade introduced some new features:


The 24 January 1998 upgrade concerns:


The 26 May 1998 upgrade includes


The 01 September 1998 upgrade includes:


The 03 November 1998 upgrade includes:


A faster computer (Sun Ultra, 4 processors * 400MHz) was installed at CDS on 25 November 1999, thanks to the support of CNES (Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales).


The new version of 04 October 2000 introduces the following changes:


A VizieR installation is available since 28 November 2000 at the Canadian Astronomy Data Centre (CADC) (thanks to Daniel Durand and Gerald Justice). It is also the first installation of VizieR on a Linux platform.


A VizieR installation is available since 20 March 2001 at the UK Astronomy Data Centre (Cambridge) (thanks to Jim Lewis).


The following new features have been added since 07 April 2001:

An output compatible with SkyCat requirements was also added.

A bug which resulted in missing objects in the selection of objects within a rectangular box was fixed – thanks to those who reported the problem!


The following new features have been added since 05 July 2001:


A VizieR installation is now available at INASAN (Moscow). This installation also mirrors the FTP Catalogues Service, and also the Dictionary of Nomenclature of Celestial Objects


A VizieR installation is now available at Bejing Observatory (China). This installation also mirrors the FTP Catalogues Service.


New features of 07 January 2003:

In the context of the Virtual Observatory projects (AVO, NVO), a VOTable-formatted output is now accessible. Tools able to deal with VOTables are being developped, see e.g. http://us-vo.org/VOTable/

The UCDs (Unified Content Descriptor) are now visible, provided the appropriate button is checked. The UCDs are a way to describe in some uniform way the several thousand tables accessible via VizieR. Currently just the UCD attached to each column of each table is displayed – the next step will be the possibility of making selections (for both input and output) based on the UCDs.


13 May 2004: installation of VOPlot2.1

  this file updated on: 2011-03-31