The Sloan Digital Sky Survey is on its way to build a very large map of the universe. We look at implementing web services that help in getting image cutouts from the FITS files in the SDSS archive. These cutouts would be provided in the traditional FITS format. We present the interface, the algorithm and usage of the FITS Cutout Web Service.

The Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) is a powerful and widely adopted means of exchanging Astronomical Data. There are also a great number of tools and libraries available on many platforms to facilitate working with FITS. We present the FitsLib , A library written to facilitate development of astronomical data analysis tools on the Microsoft.Net Platform. This has been developed as a wrapper over one of the very popular and time tested FITS libraries, CFITSIO. Fits.Net library merges the advantages of speed and ruggedness of CFITSIO with the language independence of the Microsoft.Net technology and a simple Document Object Model (DOM). We believe this library will be intuitive for .NET programmers. We present the design and usage patterns of the library in C-Sharp. We also discuss performance issues of the library. Finally we present a number of applications and web services, which are currently running on this library.

The Astronomical Data Query Language (ADQL) is a proposed standard query language for the interoperability of the International Virtual Observatory. The data servers in the International Virtual Observatory could be searched using an ADQL query. The servers would return VOTables as a result of the query.