Gaia

• Gaia is an ambitious mission to chart a three-dimensional map of our Galaxy, the Milky Way, in the process revealing the composition, formation and evolution of the Galaxy. Gaia will provide unprecedented positional and radial velocity measurements with the accuracies needed to produce a stereoscopic and kinematic census of about one billion stars in our Galaxy and throughout the Local Group. This amounts to about 1 per cent of the Galactic stellar population.
• Right now we are at Gaia DR2 (06/2019)

Basic Information:

• Gaia website at ESA
• Gaia data and tools summary page
• All data are available from the ESA Gaia Data Archive
  • Also at Gaia at CDS; Gaia at ARI; Gaia at AIP; and Gaia at ASDC
  • And all Gaia data can be directly downloaded from here in .csv format

Data Release:

• Gaia Data Release 1
• Gaia Data Release 2
  • Online documents
  • Gaia DR2 data models
  • Gaia DR2 known issues
  • Official tutorials to use Gaia DR2 data
  • Video guide for scientists

Using Gaia Data

• Estimating distances from parallaxes. IV. Distances to 1.33 billion stars in Gaia data release 2
  • The “BailerJones” catalog of distance.
• Tutorials on the use of (Gaia) astrometry in astronomical data analysis or inference problems
  • By Anthony Brown. This is a must read
  • Also see his example of the construction of a sample of sources from Gaia DR2 with all recommend data quality filtering applied
  • And Python code for calculating the Renormalized Unit Weight Error from the Gaia DR2 table columns
• Slides about Gaia DR2 astrometry
• Slides about Working with Gaia Data
• The Gaia TAP+ catalog can be accessed through astroquery.gaia module. Here is a Python example for DR2
• Exploring Gaia data with TOPCAT and STILTS
• Gaia-Kepler.fun
  • This website provides cross-matched catalogs of Gaia data for stars observed by Kepler/K2

Social Media

• [Twitter handle: @ESAGaia](https://twitter.com/ESAGaia)

Important Documents:

Special Issues:

• There are too many important publications about the Gaia mission, instrument, data reduction, and data release. Most of these “official” publications are compiled into two special issues of the Astronomy & Astrophysics:
  • A&A Special Issue: Gaia Data Release 1
  • A&A Special Issue: Gaia Data Release 2

Important Publications:

• For using DR2 data, the most important ones are:
  • Gaia Data Release 2
  • Gaia Data Release 2 - Summary of the contents and survey properties
  • Gaia Data Release 2 - Using Gaia parallaxes
  • Gaia Data Release 2 - Cross-match with external catalogues: algorithms and results

Softwares and Tools:

• PyGaia - Python toolkit for basic Gaia data simulation, manipulation, and analysis
  • By Anthony Brown. PyGaia provides python modules for the simulation of Gaia data and their errors, as well modules for the manipulation and analysis of the Gaia catalogue data
• [__gaia_tools__ - Tools for working with the @ESAGaia data and related data sets](https://github.com/jobovy/gaia_tools)
  • By Jo Bovy. Tools for working with the ESA/Gaia data and related data sets (APOGEE, GALAH, LAMOST DR2, and RAVE).
• GaiaTools - A collection of scripts for analyzing the data from the Gaia satellite
  • By the Oxford’s Galactic Dynamics group.
• Gaia TAP+ through astroquery.gaia
• find_gaia_dr2.py
  • By CDS. Depends on python-cdsclient
• Gaia Sky - a real-time, 3D, astronomy visualisation software

Conferences and Sprints

• Gaia Sprints
  • A project to support exploration and scientific use of the Gaia Data Releases.
  • There are a lot of interesting discussions and ideas can be found in the sprint website.
• KITP Project 2019: Dynamical Models for Stars and Gas in Galaxies in the Gaia Era
  • Most of the talks can be found on line
  • There is also a associated conference: In the Balance: Stasis and Disequilibrium in the Milky Way
• Gaia Data Workshop - Heidelberg 2018
  • A lot of useful slides are available here.
• Gaia Data Release 2 London workshop
• 49th Saas-Fee Advanced Course - The Milky Way in the Gaia Era
  • Video lectures and course materials are available.