Dear Becky,

Thank you for your message. Please note that these outreach images are created by the HST mission for outreach purposes, and their astrometry will therefore sometimes not be as precise as Gaia. We will pass this information on to the Hubble Outreach team and see if there is anything that can be done to improve the astrometry of the images within ESASky. 

Kind regards,

Debbie, on behalf of the ESASky team

Hi, 

I'm afraid I can't reproduce the issue you are having with the Publications feature, I'm trying in the region you gave GAL 223.5904988 -08.6562613 with almost the same field of view: 9.6° X 4.8° (see image below). Perhaps you experienced a connection error between ESASky and the service we use to collect the publication data? Can you try again and if you're still having this issue, please provide us with a few more details (your operating system and the browsers you are trying).:

Regarding the blue shadows you see in the background image, these are indeed instrumental. The colour image you see in the background of ESASky comes from the second Digitized Sky Survey (DSS2), which is a digitized version of several photographic ground-based surveys of the sky, produced by the Space Telescope Science Institute between 1983 and 2006. The colour background (HiPS) in ESASky was created by the Strasboug astronomical Data Center (CDS) by combining the three DSS2 filters in the red, blue and infrared. What you're seeing here looks like a reflection of part of the telescope instrumentation in the blue filter images. 

Another user had a similar question about a different strange artifact in the same background sky, which might help answer your question: https://esdc.userecho.com/communities/1/topics/222-curious-as-to-what-this-is

Many thanks for contacting us and for using ESASky!

Kind regards,

Deborah on behalf of the ESASky team

Hi,

You can do this by right clicking in the sky (or press and hold if you are using a tablet or mobile) and a window appears with the coordinates and 5 icons: 

If you click on the SIMBAD or the NED icon, you will be taken to these tools and shown a list of objects that are in the region and how far away these objects lie from your cursor position. More information about this feature can be found here: 

https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/esdc/esasky-interface#MODES

I hope this helps and many thanks for using ESASky.

Kind regards,

Debbie on behalf of the ESASky team

Hi, 

Many thanks for your message. Unfortunately the machines used to create the background skies (HiPS) were being upgraded last week and it took longer than expected, and all HiPS updates were on hold (including the M42 region). 

The updating of all HiPS has been restarted again and these images will be generated and visible soon in ESASky. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Many thanks for contacting us and for using ESASky.

Best regards,

Debbie, on behalf of the ESASky team

Dear Richard,

Many thanks for your message. Yes, it seems the outreach image functionality (where ESASky displays the entire image and goes to the centre of the image) is overruling the field of view and coordinate information. 

We'll work on solving this issue and let you know when it's fixed. 

Kind regards,

Debbie on behalf of the ESASky team

Dear Becky,

We're pleased to tell you we've added this functionality to ESASky: 

Dear Millennium Twain,

From what I understand, this is a very large catalogue that you'd like to view in ESASky, and to possibly filter for certain types of objects? 

I'm happy to tell you that ESASky now provides access to VizieR and the 4 versions of the Milliquas catalogue are appearing in ESASky. When I search in VizieR, the latest version of the catalogue appears to be: The Million Quasars (Milliquas) catalogue, version 7.2 (Flesch, 2021); the VII/290/catalog, and I can find it and load it in ESASky by doing the following:

• Click on the 5th icon in the top left (when hovering it says 'Explore data from external data centres in this region')
• Click on the 'VizieR' tab
• In the search field, search for 'Flesch' or even better, search for 'VII/290/catalog'
• Open the 'VII_nonstellar' tree
• If you want to load sources within the field of view displayed in ESASky, toggle on the 'FoV restricted' button in the top right of the External Data Centres window and then select the first icon on the left of the catalogue, in the Open column (when hovered over it says 'open table'). 
• By toggling off the 'FoV restricted' button you will load the whole table, however, please note this is limited to 10,000 sources so as not to overload the browser. What you can next do is filter the query for quasars, for example, by filtering the 'Type' column in the catalogue. You can do this using the ADQL functionality within ESASky (select the 3rd icon in the Query column (when hovered over it says 'create a custom ADQL query'). And you can type something like the following (and see the image below): 

SELECT TOP 10000 * FROM "VII/290/catalog"

WHERE 1=CONTAINS( POINT('ICRS', RAJ2000, DEJ2000), CIRCLE('ICRS', 235.65,10.0, 10.0))

AND Type = 'Q'

The above ADQL code brings back the first 10000 rows (TOP 10000) and all columns (*) from the VII/290 catalogue (FROM "VII/290/catalog") centred at coordinates RA=235.65, DEC = 10.0 and a radius of 10.0 degrees (2nd line) and also only selecting Quasars (Type = 'Q'). 

Note, this type of query is still restricted to returning 10000 objects in the sky (even if you remove TOP 10000). Let us know if you need to visualise more objects in the sky or the type of use case you are trying to do. 

To find out more about this functionality and about ADQL commands, please read our help pages here: https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/esdc/esasky-interface#EXTTAP

I hope all this helps.

Best regards,

Deborah, on behalf of the ESASky team

Dear Andy,

We've released the latest version of ESASky today and I'm happy to say we've fixed the bug you reported to us. Proper motion columns are correct again:

Many thanks for reporting this to us!

Best regards,

Debbie on behalf of the ESASky team

Dear Nuria,

Many thanks for your use case, we've created a ticket and added it to our backlog. 

We'll let you know as soon as we're able to implement it!

Many thanks and regards,

Debbie on behalf of the ESASky team

Dear Nuria,

Great to hear from you! There is a method, albeit slightly indirect, to measure the distance in ESASky. You can do this using the cone, box or polygon search. When you select these in the search field, click on one star and then move to another and the distance appears (see this video for an example).

As you know, you can also load up your own target list, via the scroll icon in the search field, which will highlight your objects in the sky with a square. I'm not sure if this would completely fulfil your use case though? Can you give more details how you'd like to search for more than one object at a time? Would you want them to be tagged, or an extra column to be added with distances? 

Many thanks and regards!

Debbie on behalf of the ESASky team