RAVE Archive

RAVE (RAdial Velocity Experiment)

RAVE is an ambitious program to conduct a survey to measure the radial velocities, metallicities and abundance ratios for up to a million stars using the 1.2-m UK Schmidt Telescope of the Anglo-Australian Observatory (AAO), over the period 2003 - 2010. The survey represents a giant leap forward in our understanding of our own Milky Way galaxy, providing a vast stellar kinematic database larger than any other survey proposed for this coming decade.

The main data product will be a southern hemisphere survey of about a million stars. This survey would comprise 0.7 million thin disk main sequence stars, 250,000 thick disk stars, 100,000 bulge and halo stars, and a further 50,000 giant stars including some out to 10 kpc from the Sun. RAVE will offer the first truly representative inventory of stellar radial velocities for all major components of the Galaxy. Its completeness and homogeneity will make it an invaluable stand-alone resource, but its full potential will be realised when the radial velocities are combined with proper motions and parallaxes from other sources (USNO, Tycho).

A key aspect of the scientific case for RAVE is that the data will be accessible via the Virtual Observatory (VO). It is therefore the intention of the RAVE Science Working Group and the Anglo-Australian Observatory that full compliance with VO requirements will be established for the data products ab initio. RAVE will thus be the first astronomical mega-project designed from its beginnings to be incorporated into the Virtual Observatory.

The RAVE-project plans to relaunch their website. One of the data-access components is a browser-based access to observational and processed data. GAVO supported the development of this component.

The RAVE-project permits a partial publication through a webapp running inside the GAVO-portal.

RAVE Data access

Currently there is no published data available. The data-files are password-protected. As soon as the planned first data-release is published, those fields will be publicly accessible.

Finding fields is through a form or clickable maps. Both ways it's a primitive cone search with a searchradius of 3 deg.
Two menu-entries show different coordinate maps of the sky. Click on those maps, and a list of observational data will pop up.

Red colors indicate already observed fields, while blue colors show the planned fields.

Raw and Red(uced) entries provide links to the observational data, while Processing provides links to data coming from the reduction-pipeline.

Members of the RAVE-project can access those links using their appropriate passwords.

Links

• See the RAVE website for more information about the RAVE experiment: