C.1 Acknowledgements

TOPCAT was initially (2003-2005) developed under the UK Starlink project (1980-2005, R.I.P.). Since then it has been supported by grant PP/D002486/1 from the UK's Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, the VOTech project (from EU FP6), the AstroGrid project (from PPARC/STFC), the AIDA project (from EU FP7), grants ST/H008470/1, ST/I00176X/1, ST/J001414/1 and ST/L002388/1 from the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), the GAVO project (BMBF Bewilligungsnummer 05A08VHA), the European Space Agency, and the FP7 project GENIUS. All of this support is gratefully acknowledged.

Nearly all of this work has been done in the Astrophysics Group of the School of Physics, in the University of Bristol, UK, although the University of Cambridge and the University of Heidelberg have also been involved.

Inspiration for some of TOPCAT's features has been taken from the following pre-existing tools:

• Mirage (Bell labs)
• VOPlot (VO-India)

Apart from the excellent Java 2 Standard Edition itself, the following external libraries provide parts of TOPCAT's functionality:

• JEL (Konstantin Metlov, GNU) for algebraic expression evaluation
• PixTools (Nikolay Kuropatkin, Fermilab EAG) for HEALPix-based celestial sphere row matching
• IVOARegistry (NVO) for ADQL/X->S translations in registry searches
• HTM (Sloan Digital Sky Survey) for HTM-based celestial sphere row matching (now deprecated within TOPCAT)
• Ptplot (Ptolemy) for some 2D axis plotting
• iText for PDF output
• EPSGraphics2D (Jibble) for encapsulated postscript output
• IVOA FITS Package (Sloan Digital Sky Survey) for simple (non-SoG) display of FITS images
• ADQL (Grégory Mantelet, CDS) for ADQL parsing
• MOC (CDS) Multi-Order Coverage HEALPix maps for footprint manipulation
• nom.tam.fits (NASA) for parts of FITS I/O
• Skyview in a Jar (NASA) for sky axis drawing
• JLaTeXMath (Scilab) for LaTeX typesetting in plots
• JIDE Common Layer (Jidesoft) for double-ended slider controls
• BrowserLauncher2 for launching default web browser

Contributed code from the following people is gratefully acknowledged:

• Thomas Boch (CDS), for the VizieR load dialogue.
• Gerard Lemson (MPE, Garching) for the GAVO load dialogue.
• Marco Molinaro (INAF-OATS) for the BaSTI load dialogue.

The TOPCAT logo in use since version 4 was kindly drawn by Phil Hall.

Colour maps available for the plotting have been taken from various places, including SkyCat/GAIA, MatPlotLib 1.5, Gnuplot, Daniel Michalik, Paul Tol, Color Brewer, HCL Wizard, Dave Green, and probably some others I forgot.

TOPCAT has benefitted from, and is largely shaped by, advice, comments and feedback from very many users, testers and developers. Some of the notable contributers are these:

• Alasdair Allan (Starlink, Exeter)
• Mark Allen (CDS)
• Heinz Andernach (Guanajuato)
• Thomas Boch (CDS)
• Laurent Bourges (JMMC)
• Danny Boxhoorn (Kapteyn, Groningen)
• Baptiste Cecconi (LESIA)
• Igor Chilingarian (CfA)
• Malcolm Currie (Starlink, RAL)
• Clive Davenhall (Royal Observatory Edinburgh)
• Luke Davies (Bristol)
• Christoph Deil (MPI Heidelberg)
• Markus Demleitner (ARI Heidelberg)
• Sebastien Derriere (CDS)
• Emilio Donoso (ICATE)
• Peter Draper (Starlink, Durham)
• Pierre Fernique (CDS)
• Shashikiran Ganesh (PRL, India)
• David Giaretta (Starlink, RAL)
• Eduardo Gonzalez-Solares (IoA)
• Norman Gray (Starlink, Glasgow)
• Phil Hall (Son of Ken)
• Haggis Harris (Bath)
• Evanthia Hatziminaoglou (ESO)
• Avon Huxor (Bristol/ARI)
• Jonathan Irwin (Cambridge)
• Tim Jenness (JACH)
• JJ Kavelaars (NRC)
• Grant Kennedy (IoA)
• Gerard Lemson (MPE Garching)
• Mark Mahabir (Leicester)
• Bob Mann (Royal Observatory Edinburgh)
• Grégory Mantelet (ARI)
• Ben Maughan (Bristol)
• Richard McMahon (IoA)
• Guillaume Mella (JMMC)
• Konstantin Metlov (Donetsk)
• Daniel Michalik (Lund)
• David Mills (Bristol)
• Douglas Morgan (Bristol)
• August Muench (CfA)
• Simon Murphy (ANU)
• John Murrell
• Ada Nebot (CDS)
• François Ochsenbein (CDS)
• Clive Page (Leicester)
• Menelaus Perdikeas (ESAC)
• François-Xavier Pineau (CDS)
• Roy Platon (RAL)
• James Price (Bristol)
• Paul Price (Princeton)
• Anita Richards (Jodrell Bank)
• Kristin Riebe (AIP)
• Aaron Robotham (Bristol)
• Yannick Roehlly (OAMP)
• Mike Read (ROE)
• Henrik Rydberg (Gothenburg drinking water laboratory)
• Juan Carlos Segovia (ESAC)
• Petr ??koda (AIAS, CZ)
• Mattia Vaccari (Western Cape)
• Juande Sandander Vela (IAA-CSIC)
• Mike Watson (Leicester)
• Ivan Zolotukhin (SAI MSU)
• Jonathan Zwart (Columbia)

If you use this software in published work, the following citation would be appreciated:

2005ASPC..347...29T: M. B. Taylor, "TOPCAT & STIL: Starlink Table/VOTable Processing Software", in Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems XIV, eds. P Shopbell et al., ASP Conf. Ser. 347, p. 29 (2005)