CHANDRA ELECTRONIC ANNOUNCEMENT NUMBER 51
                          27 October 2008


Three announcements:   

1. Chandra Source Catalog
                                
2. Cycle 10 Supplementary Education and Public Outreach Proposals (E/PO)

3. Chandra Fellows Symposium Webcast

                                                                          
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Item 1.  Chandra Source Catalog  
===============================


The Chandra X-ray Center is pleased to announce that public access to
the Chandra Source Catalog (CSC) database is now available.

The CSC Data Access GUI may be accessed via the catalog web site,

                 http://cxc.cfa.harvard.edu/csc/

The CSC is the definitive catalog of X-ray sources detected by the
Chandra X-ray Observatory, and provides simple access to Chandra data
for individual sources or sets of sources matching user-specified
search criteria.  For each X-ray source, the catalog lists the source
position and a detailed set of source properties, including commonly
used quantities such as multi-band aperture fluxes, hardness ratios,
temporal variability information, and source extent estimates.  In
addition, the catalog includes file-based data products that can be
manipulated interactively by the user, including images, photon event
lists, light curves, and spectra for each source individually from
each observation in which a source is detected.

Please note:

o Java version 1.5 or greater must be installed on your system to use
  the catalog GUI.

o The catalog will be released to the user community in a series of
  increments with increasing capability.  The first official release
  of the CSC will take place in January 2009, and will include
  information about sources detected in public imaging observations
  from roughly the first eight years of the Chandra mission.

o At this time, we are supporting public access to the database of
  sources and observations processed so-far.  At the time of writing,
  roughly 50,000 X-ray source detections, corresponding to about
  35,000 distinct sources on the sky, are included in the database
  and visible to users, and these numbers are increasing daily.

o The CSC is constructed from pointed observations obtained using the
  Chandra X-ray Observatory; it is not an all-sky catalog, and does
  not include sources detected to a uniform depth.  The first release
  of the catalog includes only point and compact sources, with
  observed spatial extents < ~30 arcsec; observations of fields
  containing extended sources are excluded from the catalog.

-- The CSC Project Team


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Item 2.  Cycle 10 Supplementary Education and Public Outreach Proposals (E/PO)
==============================================================================


We are accepting proposals for the Cycle 10 Education and Public Outreach
grant opportunity. Each science research proposal selected in Cycle 10 enables 
the
submission of one E/PO supplementary proposal. Eligibility to propose has been 
expanded to include all science team members based in the US. See the E/PO
CfP at http://chandra.harvard.edu/edu/proposals/ for specific details. The 
deadline for electronic submission of proposals is 5PM EDT, October 24, 2008.

Kathleen Lestition
CXC Education and Outreach Coordinator
       

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Item 3.  Chandra Fellows Symposium Webcast
==========================================

This year we will be webcasting the 

Chandra Fellows Symposium 
Oct. 17, 2008
9:00 am to 5:00 pm

Keep an eye on http://cxc.harvard.edu/
for instructions on how to receive it.


Nancy Evans
Director's Office



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