Setting up AstroGrid for use with GRIP

For GRIP to use AstroGrid you must first have AstroGrid's Virtual Observatory (VO) Desktop running. You can download that and install it by following very simple instructions on the AstroGrid site.

Also you need to copy VODesktop's 3 jar files (the RMI versions of acr-interface-1.2.2.jar, rmi-lite-1.0.jar and commons-logging-1.0.3.jar) into a /lib directory under the directory from which GRIP is running. You can check that by examining GRIP's run.bat file. GRIP will not fail if it does not find these files but you will get a message box if you try to access the AstroGrid services.

There are some issues with using AstroGrid which I am attempting to clarify with them before going further. The main one is that if you set a field width greater than about 1 degree there seems to be a restriction on the amount of data coming back. The data are truncated and so cannot be marshalled across the RMI interface. Worse than that, AstroGrid does not give a message that GRIP can intercept in such cases so it just seems to fail without explanation. GRIP does not crash however - just try again or do something different.