The first Training Event of the Astronomy Competence Centre Pilot project (Astro-CC Pilot) will take place at Centro de Astrobiología (Madrid, Spain) from Tuesday 2 to Thursday 4 December 2025. The goal of the Astro-CC project is to enable members of the astronomy, heliospheric physics, planetary science, and astro-particle physics communities to accelerate the use of Open Science by supporting the implementation of FAIR principles.
The Virtual Observatory (VO) is opening up new ways of exploiting the huge amount of data provided by the ever-growing number of ground-based and space facilities, as well as by computer simulations. The goal of this Training Event is twofold:
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Expose participants to the variety of VO tools and services available today so that they can use them efficiently for their own research.
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Gather requirements and feedback from participants.
To achieve these goals, VO experts will lecture and tutor the participants on the usage of VO tools and services. Real life examples of scientific applications will be given. A large fraction of the time will be dedicated to hands-on exercises, which will allow participants to become fully familiar with the VO capabilities on their own laptops.
The admission procedure will be as follows: first, those interested must apply to participate in the school using the "Registration" link. Applications can be submitted until 14 October. For PhD students, a letter of recommendation from their supervisor, explaining why the school is of interest to them and how it can help in their research, will be required. If registered as postdocs, they should provide a couple of articles in peer-reviewed journals where they appear as co-authors, or alternatively, a link to their thesis.
Afterwards, the organizing committee will evaluate the proposals received, and will inform applicants by late October. The organization will cover the main travel costs (within Europe) and accommodation expenses for the accepted participants.
The school will take place exclusively on-site and will be limited to 40 people.
(The Astro-CC project is funded by an OSCARS cascading grant)
