›Gaia 2016 Data Release #1 Workshop

The Gaia mission will allow creating a precise three-dimensional map of about one billion stars throughout our Galaxy and beyond. In the process, it will determine their motions, which encode the origin and subsequent evolution of the Galaxy. Through comprehensive photometric classification, it will provide the detailed physical properties of each star observed: characterizing their luminosity, temperature, gravity, and elemental composition. This massive stellar census will provide the basic observational data to tackle an enormous range of important problems related to the origin, structure and evolutionary history of our Galaxy.

After a successful launch on 19 December 2013, commissioning and first years of routine operations, Gaia will make its first data release in the summer of 2016. Pending successful validation, the Gaia Data Release 1 catalogues will be consisting of:

Positions (α, δ) and G magnitudes for all stars with acceptable formal standard errors on positions. Positions and individual uncertainties are computed using a generic prior and Bayes' rule (detailed description in "Gaia astrometry for stars with too few observations. A Bayesian approach"). For this release, it is assumed that at least 90% of the sky can be covered.
At the beginning of the routine phase, a special scanning mode repeatedly covering the ecliptic poles on every spin was executed for calibration purposes. Photometric data of RR Lyrae and Cepheid variable stars based on these high-cadence measurements will be released.
The five-parameter astrometric solution - positions, parallaxes, and proper motions - for stars in common between the Tycho-2 Catalogue and Gaia will be released. The catalogue is based on the Tycho-Gaia Astrometric Solution (Image of the Week with short TGAS description; paper with a more detailed description; paper describing theory and background; paper describing quasar extension).

OBJECTIVES
This workshop, jointly organised by ESA and DPAC, will give you a basic introduction to the mission concept and performance in space, an overview of the catalogue contents including scientific quality and practical information on how to handle them for your science research.

There will be ample time for question and answer sessions with the mission experts to help attendees make progress with their particular science projects, and attendees will be encouraged to foster collaborations with other scientists interested in Gaia data. Participants can also take the chance to access science data from all other ESA missions and consult with the experts on site.


Attendees are expected to come to the workshop with their laptops to be able to participate in the hands-on session. Instructions will be given well before the workshop on a minimal set of software packages that might be needed for the hands-on sessions (mostly TopCat, and other data analysis environments like python, R, IDL, etc).


CONTENTS
Mission description
In-flight performance
Contents of Gaia Data Release 1
Data Quality
- Astrometry
- Photometry
- Variability
- Validation
Practical issues
- Archive (simple and ADQL query forms)
- Data structures and their handling
- Visualization tools