Simple Cone Search

This Simple Cone Search (ConeSearch) defines a simple query protocol for retrieving records from a catalog of astronomical sources. The query describes sky position and an angular distance, defining a cone on the sky. The response returns a list of astronomical sources from the catalog whose positions lie within the cone, formatted as a VOTable.

Current Recommendation

Current IVOA Recommendation is ConeSearch-1.03 (20080222).

Its RFC page can be found here and the sequence of PR leading to SCS-1.03 can be found in the IVOA Document Repository.

Errata for this specification can be found here.

Next page for this specification can be found here.

Current Activities

A revision of the Simple Cone Search is in progress.

The drafting process can be followed on the IVOA-std GitHub repo (replacing the former volute, already in ivoatex format).

Discussion will happen on the DAL mailing list, DAL sessions, GitHub repo issues, slack channels and other media, and possibly summarised on the Cone Search 1.03 Next TWiki topic.

Historical record

Since it was linked in the 1.03 Recommendation, but the URL was broken, a copy of the originating NVO conesearch specification, from which the ConeSearch started off, is now attached here:

• Conesearch definition (Roy Williams, Bob Hanish, Alex Szalay; Aprl 2002)