What is the NVO?
See also Frequently Asked Questions. The NVO is the National Virtual Observatory, the US-based Virtual Observatory project that is collaborating with the International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) to make it possible for astronomical researchers to find, retrieve, and analyze astronomical data from ground- and space-based telescopes worldwide. The origin of the NVO can be traced to the establishment in the early 1990s of wavelength-oriented science archive centers for NASA mission datasets. These were the first comprehensive astronomy archive facilities having a close connection between data and expertise in calibrating and using the data. Also, during the 1990s several large-scale digital sky surveys were begun, most notably the Sloan and 2MASS surveys. The images and source catalogs derived from these surveys demonstrated the value of homogeneous, on-line datasets. In April 1999, the concept for a “National Virtual Observatory” arose at a meeting of the Decadal Survey Panel on
