From September 10 through 12, the Astronomical Society of Japan (ASJ) held its annual fall meeting at Tohoku University (Kawauchi campus). The East Asian ALMA Regional Center (EA-ARC) set up a booth in cooperation of the NAOJ Astronomy Data Center to introduce a new virtual observatory function that makes it easy to access and download the archive data of the ALMA Telescope.

ALMA observations are carried out according to observation proposals prepared by researchers. The observation data is made available only to the researcher group that submitted the proposal for a year and thereafter the data is stored in the ALMA data archive and becomes accessible and downloadable to everyone who wants to use it for his/her research. However, the data size for an ALMA observation reaches tens of gigabits and it would be difficult for researchers to find and download their intended data from such a huge amount of data in a short time. Then, as a solution for this, the NAOJ Japanese Virtual Observatory (JVO) project and EA-ARC have jointly developed software to simplify the search for and analysis of the archive data. This software allows researchers easy access to the desired data in a giant database and increases the efficiency of their investigation.

Many astronomers at the ALMA booth seemed very interested in the new virtual observatory function while experiencing the demonstration with the support of NAOJ staff.