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

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

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

An Hα_\alpha Catalogue of Galaxies in Hickson Compact Groups. I. The Sample

We present H$_\alpha$ photometry for a sample of 95 galaxies in Hickson Compact Groups obtained from observations of 31 groups. The Catalogue lists isophotal and adaptive aperture (Kron aperture) flux measurements for about 75% of the accordant galaxies inside the observed HCGs, 22 out of which are upper limits. Non standard data reduction procedures have been used to obtain the continuum subtracted H$_\alpha$ images for each HCG of the target sample. Flux calibration has also been performed in order to obtain H$_\alpha$ luminosities for the whole sample. Both the data reduction and calibration procedures are carefully described in this paper. The new data listed in this Catalogue are of great importance in understanding the star formation rate inside HCG galaxies and in giving new insights on its dependence on galaxy interactions.Comment: Accepted for publication in A&AS, 22 pages, including 23 figure

A new Miocene deep-sea chiton and early evidence for Teredinidae-sustained wood-fall communities

Deep-sea wood-falls are important biodiversity hot spots for insights on chemosynthesis-based communities. The study of deep-sea wood-fall-related palaeocommunities from the Neogene of north Italy shed light on interesting associations from the Miocene of Torrente Cinghio (Tortonian) and of Moncasale di Casina (Langhian). The most common components of this association are typical chemosynthetic/wood-fall molluscs, such as the gastropods Homalopoma sp. and Pseudonina bellardii, the bivalves Idas sp. and shipworms, and the chiton Leptochiton lignatilis n. sp., which belongs to a genus typical of recent sunken woods in tropical waters. The new species described is compared with other fossil and recent congeners, especially with those sharing the same kind of tegmental sculpture, fully covered with randomly or quincuncially arranged granules. An overview of the sunken wood-related chitons is provided. Surprisingly no taxa of the boring bivalves of the family Xylophagidae, whose species have been known to be fundamental for sustaining this kind of deep sea chemosynthetic ecosystem, were found in the studied site; however, other boring Teredinidae bivalves have been abundantly recovered. This suggests that, conversely to what has previously been observed on sunken wood communities, Teredinidae may be viewed as a counterpart for the maintenance of deep-sea wood-fall ecosystems