SSW2022 Activities

Introduction

The Sagan Summer Workshop (SSW) is held annually and is meant to be a week-long summer "school" for early career astronomers (advanced undergraduates and graduate students/postdocs. The conferences traditionally have a substantial hands-on component. Each year, they pick a different theme. In 2022, the theme was Exoplanet Science in the Gaia Era. Several of the hands-on components from earlier in the week can be done using IRSA tools, so this is what we have reproduced here. See the SSW website for recordings of the talks that led into these hands-on sessions, as well as detailed instructions as to how to do these exercises using the Google Colab Notebooks provided by the workshop team.

Monday Afternoon

1. Query the Gaia Catalog of Nearby Stars (GCNS) for all stars within 20 pc - as of the time I am writing this, the GCNS isn't available at IRSA, so you have to either go directly to the ESA Gaia Archive to get it, or get it from VizieR, like at this ftp site. The GCNS is large, but you can get it in csv format, which IRSA tools understand. To make this process easier, though, here is a truncated csv version of this catalog.
   1. Download and uncompress that, or download your own copy from VizieR.