TOPCAT demo: Astronomy software tutorial for data table matching and plotting

TOPCAT is a free tool developed to help anyone read, understand, plot, and match astrophysical data tables. This tutorial doesn't cover all its functionality, but it will help people get started with using it. You don't need to be an astronomer to use it, but a lot of the functionality is designed for astrophysics, e.g. matching based on sky coordinates.

You may hear me mention a "report" a few times, and that's because many people watching this will be part of a course I'm teaching where students do a project on astrophysical research and then write a report on it. But the same advice about the "report" applies to a research paper or other final presentation: generally speaking, you should use TOPCAT in combination with a scripting language like Python, so that you can easily replicate your analysis and plots.

0:00 Intro
1:06 Opening a table
2:06 Basic table properties
4:01 Showing and hiding table columns
8:48 Opening and closing windows
9:17 Plotting a histogram
11:45 Plotting a scatter plot
12:33 Exploring data: plots and activation actions
17:16 Combining columns when plotting
17:59 Subsets
20:44 Defining plot ranges
21:11 Changing plot styles/colours
22:28 Adding an auxiliary axis
24:00 Saving table snapshots
24:53 Matching tables
32:45 Exploring data: table rows and activation actions
34:28 Displaying any image file on your computer in TOPCAT
37:53 Renaming columns
38:19 Saving tables in a different format
39:06 Saving TOPCAT sessions

[davidrojas]

Thank you so much, this is an excellent introduction to TOPCAT, really clear and useful.