In parallel with the rise of digital detector-based astronomy, NOAO pioneered the development of online data archives and versatile astronomical software. Today, NOAO is developing and deploying new capabilities to connect the astronomical community with new scientific opportunities presented by wide-field surveys, petabyte-scale archives, and data-intensive astronomy methods.

Data Archives

All raw data from NOAO telescopes and instruments, and from NOAO observing programs on telescopes operated by the WIYN, SOAR, and SMARTS consortia are available when their proprietary periods have expired. In addition, data from the CCD Mosaic Imagers, NEWFIRM, and DECam are pipeline-reduced and made available. Uniform data sets from NOAO Surveys can be found in the NOAO data archives as well.

Major Surveys

NOAO hosts and operates some of the world's premier facilities for wide-field astronomical surveys. Major projects using these facilities map our Galaxy and universe on massive scales, and deliver large and homogeneous data sets that enable archival research by all astronomers.

Software

NOAO developed IRAF, the Image Reduction and Analysis Facility, and continues to maintain and update it. A large number of external packages to perform more sophisticated processing or reduce data from specific instruments can also be downloaded. IRAF has been used to create automatic data reduction pipelines for several instruments on NOAO telescopes.

Documentation

NOAO provides documentation that ranges from general guides on reducing astronomical data of various types to specific manuals for unique instruments.

Data Lab

Data Lab is NOAO's initiative to enable high-level data discovery, exploration, visualization, and analysis within the massive wide-field data sets being produced by major survey programs at NOAO observing facilities. Data Lab will also provide the astronomical community with access to the kinds of data-intensive astronomy capabilities that will become increasingly prominent in the LSST era.

ANTARES

The Arizona-NOAO Temporal Analysis and Response to Events System (ANTARES) is a collaboration between NOAO and the Department of Computer Science at the University of Arizona to enable broad-based time-domain science in the LSST era by building a flexible public "event broker" capable of filtering the ~10 million alerts per night to be delivered by LSST.

AEON

The Astronomical Event Observatory Network (AEON) is a nascent resource for the often time-critical follow-up of discoveries from synoptic sky surveys.

Other NOAO data

Access the NOAO Deep Wide Field Survey, various NOAO spectral atlases, KPNO and CTIO photographic plate logs, and other miscellaneous data.