PHYS 450 Capstone Preparation: Spectra, Standards, labs, maps

IPAC at Caltech partners with NASA, NSF, JPL and the world-wide research community to advance exploration of our Universe. Beginning with the IRAS mission in 1985 and spanning to Spitzer today, we have enabled transformative research of the infrared sky. We provide science operations, user support, data services, and scientific vision to maximize discovery with observatories both in space and on the ground. We share these discoveries with the public through education outreach programs and award-winning media.

LEVEL5 is an on-going and developing experimental service supported in part by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) (through the Applied Information Systems Research Program: AISRP) and by the Carnegie Institution of Washington (CIW), in conjunction with the NASA/IPAC Extragalactic Database (NED). LEVEL5 is operated out of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) on the campus of the California Institute of Technology (CIT) in Pasadena, California.

The purpose of LEVEL5 is to bring together in a single gateway WEB site (where copyrights allow) "original" documents and reviews and/or electronic links to articles of current and lasting interest to cosmologists, particle physicists and extragalactic astronomers.

LEVEL5 is a hyperlinked document, providing multiple paths to information, presented at a variety of levels of complexity: from simple definitions up to essays, recent research articles, detailed monographs and extensive reviews. Within each of these articles, the individual extragalactic objects cited in the text are cross-linked to the NED Basic Data frames, and similarly all available citations are hyperlinked to NASA's Abstract Data Service (ADS) or to ASTRO-PH, in some important cases prior to publication. Tabular Data, images and graphs are also provided and are being progressively linked to and from essays and review articles.

The Particle Data Group is an international collaboration charged with summarizing Particle Physics, as well as related areas of Cosmology and Astrophysics. In 2014, the PDG consists of 206 authors from 140 institutions in 24 countries.

The SIMBAD astronomical database provides basic data, cross-identifications, bibliography and measurements for astronomical objects outside the solar system.

VizieR provides access to the most complete library of published astronomical catalogues and data tables available on line organized in a self-documented database. Query tools allow the user to select relevant data tables and to extract and format records matching given criteria. Currently, 15948 catalogues are available.