Easylife: the data reduction and survey handling system for VIPERS

We present Easylife, the software environment developed within the framework of the VIPERS project for automatic data reduction and survey handling. Easylife is a comprehensive system to automatically reduce spectroscopic data, to monitor the survey advancement at all stages, to distribute data within the collaboration and to release data to the whole community. It is based on the OPTICON founded project FASE, and inherits the FASE capabilities of modularity and scalability. After describing the software architecture, the main reduction and quality control features and the main services made available, we show its performance in terms of reliability of results. We also show how it can be ported to other projects having different characteristics.Comment: pre-print, 17 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacifi

EZ: A Tool for Automatic Redshift Measurement

We present EZ (Easy redshift), a tool we have developed within the VVDS project to help in redshift measurement from otpical spectra. EZ has been designed with large spectroscopic surveys in mind, and in its development particular care has been given to the reliability of the results obtained in an automatic and unsupervised mode. Nevertheless, the possibility of running it interactively has been preserved, and a graphical user interface for results inspection has been designed. EZ has been successfully used within the VVDS project, as well as the zCosmos one. In this paper we describe its architecture and the algorithms used, and evaluate its performances both on simulated and real data. EZ is an open source program, freely downloadable from http://cosmos.iasf-milano.inaf.it/pandora.Comment: accepted for publication in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacifi

Visualization, Exploration and Data Analysis of Complex Astrophysical Data

In this paper we show how advanced visualization tools can help the researcher in investigating and extracting information from data. The focus is on VisIVO, a novel open source graphics application, which blends high performance multidimensional visualization techniques and up-to-date technologies to cooperate with other applications and to access remote, distributed data archives. VisIVO supports the standards defined by the International Virtual Observatory Alliance in order to make it interoperable with VO data repositories. The paper describes the basic technical details and features of the software and it dedicates a large section to show how VisIVO can be used in several scientific cases.Comment: 32 pages, 15 figures, accepted by PAS

1.65 micrometers (H-band) surface photometry of galaxies. III: observations of 558 galaxies with the TIRGO 1.5m telescope

We present near-infrared H-band (1.65 micron) surface photometry of 558 galaxies in the Coma Supercluster and in the Virgo cluster. This data set, obtained with the Arcetri NICMOS3 camera ARNICA mounted on the Gornergrat Infrared Telescope, is aimed at complementing, with observations of mostly early-type objects, our NIR survey of spiral galaxies in these regions, presented in previous papers of this series. Magnitudes at the optical radius, total magnitudes, isophotal radii and light concentration indices are derived. We confirm the existence of a positive correlation between the near-infrared concentration index and the galaxy H-band luminosity. (Tables 1 and 2 are only available in electronic form upon request to [email protected])Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures. Accepted for publication in A&A

EVALUATION OF VIROLOGICAL RESPONSE TO ANTIRETROVIRAL THERAPY IN PATIENTS CARRYING HIV-1 NON-B SUBTYPES ACCORDING TO BASELINE MUTATIONAL PATTERNS

OBJECTIVES: Notwithstanding the growing proportion of HIV-1 non-B subtypes in Europe, the impact of their genetic background on response to antiretroviral therapy is still unclear. The aim of this study was to compare response to protease inhibitor (PI) or non-nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitor (NNRTI) containing regimens in patients carrying non-B or B clades with matched resistance mutation patterns. METHODS: We analyzed HIV-1 pol sequences of 1,108 patients stored in the ARCA (Antiretroviral Resistance Cohort Analysis) database and obtained before treatment. Response to therapy was defined as viral load suppression below 50 HIV-1 RNA copies/ml at week 12. By evaluating the combination of major resistance mutations, genotype coding generated 35 and 12 different vectors for PI or NNRTI treatments. RESULTS: The proportion of subjects achieving virological suppression was comparable in patients with non-B or B variants stratified for treatment status (51.5% vs. 41.5% in na\uefve and 46.7% vs. 38.7% in experienced patients) and regimens including PIs (46.9% vs. 39.7%) or NNRTIs (56.7% vs. 40%). No difference in response to therapy in patients with non-B and B HIV-1 was observed in any matched genotype with respect to treatment combination. When B vs. specific non-B clades (C, F1, CRF02_AG) were compared, the only difference was a better response of CRF02_AG compared to B clade (75.0% vs. 36.7%; p=.012). CONCLUSIONS: Response to PI- and NNRTI-based therapy is comparable in patients carrying non-B or B subtype matched for HIV-1 pol genotype. Further clade-specific studies are advisable to investigate possible minor effects on response to treatment

Data Reduction and Analysis Graphical Organizer

Spectroscopic surveys are undergoing a rapid expansion in their data collecting capabilities, reaching the level of hundreds of spectra per pointing. An efficient use of such huge amounts of information requires a high degree of interconnection between the various tools involved in preparing the observations, reducing the data, and carrying out the data analysis. DRAGO (Data Reduction and Analysis Graphical Organizer) attempts to easy the process, by integrating in a global framework the main data handling components: from reduction pipelines, to data organization, plotting, and browsing tools, to storing the data reduction results in a database for further analysis. DRAGO allows the use of the astronomer own's preferred tools, by "plugging them in" in an environment which handles transparently the communications between them. See http://cosmos.mi.iasf.cnr.it/pandora .Comment: 6 pages, 9 figures, ADA III conference proceedin