Discovery of Brown Dwarfs mining the 2MASS and SDSS databases

[ last update Nov 2017]
This tutorial uses the advanced VO functionalities of Aladin (interactive sky atlas), TOPCAT (tools to work on catalogs) and STILTS to find brown dwarfs in 2MASS and SDSS surveys using three differents methods. The user learns about the filtering, cross-matching and visualization functions of Aladin and TOPCAT as well as about the implementation of scripts for Aladin and STILTS to repeat several time the same steps leading to the identification of the brown dwarfs in these surveys.

Goal of this tutorial
In this use case, we explore different ways to do the same tasks with different VO tools. These tasksinclude:
• obtaining data from the SDSS and 2MASS catalogues in a given sky region,
• crossmatching the results of these searches,
• filtering the resulting table for brown dwarfs, and
• verifying our sample of brown dwarfs.Software packages needed for this tutorial are Aladin, TOPCAT and STILTS