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), grant ST/H008470/1 from the UK's Science and Technology Facilities Council, and the GAVO project (BMBF Bewilligungsnummer 05A08VHA). 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 many of TOPCAT's features has been taken from the following pre-existing tools:

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

Contributed code from the following people is gratefully acknowledged:

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: