(1) Of course the eternal question of what are WWT and GSky doing for the professional. One answer that comes to me is cutout images. While the amateur loves to gaze in awe at the glory of the sky, the professional wants tiny pieces of the sky lined up together as image cutouts. Can they build a tool to snip pieces of sky pixel and build into an album? Can it be done by script? Can we get some kind of image-tile service from GSky and make the album that way?

(2) A schoolteacher was really excited at NVO, I showed her how to get VOTable from HEASARC, saved to the desktop, imported to Topcat. The plotting in Topcat is fab and she loved it. She said "Now I know how to teach astronomy with computers!".

(3) New slogans for NVO "VOTable: the HTML of astronomy". Or how about "Got NVO?"

(4) Finally some advice to a student, copied here:

As you requested in our discussion today, here is an example of a cone search that returns a list of spectra from DR5, in this case within 1 degree of RA=123, Dec=45. https://webtest.aoc.nrao.edu/ivoa-dal/JhuProxySsap?REQUEST=queryData&Collection=ivo://jhu/sdss/dr5&FORMAT=gif&POS=123.0,45.0&SIZE=1.0

You can get more information with the clickable form that is here. https://webtest.aoc.nrao.edu/ivoa-dal/

These services were made by Doug Tody of NRAO, who is copied on this message, and can tell me if I have give the right URLs, and answer your questions about the services.

I recommend that you use Topcat to read the resulting VOTables from the cone searches. http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/topcat/ Check out the 3D plots!

There is a command line interface to Topcat functionality called Stilts. http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/~mbt/stilts/

To fetch VOTables from archives, you can go to any of the big data centers ("NVO Inside") to, for example NED or HEASARC or Vizier http://nedwww.ipac.caltech.edu/ http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/W3Browse/w3catindex.pl http://vizier.cfa.harvard.edu/viz-bin/VizieR

There are many other ways to fetch VOTable. Command line tools from NVO provide unified access to VOTable data from archives: http://iraf-nvo.noao.edu/vo-cli/

There is a book "The National Virtual Observatory: Tools and Techniques for Astronomical Research", which has a lot of information about getting and processing VOTables. to be published as an ASP Conference Series Volume No. 382, http://www.us-vo.org/news/story.cfm?ID=32