Dear Anomymous,

with the recent upgrade of the Archive Science Portal, it is now possible to perform a search directly providing search criteria in the URL.  For instance:

http://archive.eso.org/scienceportal/home?pos=11.89,-25.29&r=0.2

Cheers,
Chiara (ASG)

Hi, 

thanks a lot for your question/suggestion. 

We agree that it will be very useful to access to the web user interface via a URL, but unfortunately with the current (beta) version of the Archive Science Portal this is still not possible.
We foreseen to add this functionality for one of the next releases, since we believe that bookmark-ability is an important requirement (e.g. be able to share the URL of a given search to a colleague or store it to reproduce the results at later times). 

At the moment, Programmatic and tool access via URLs can be achieved via the tap_obs service, e.g.: 

http://archive.eso.org/tap_obs/sync?REQUEST=doQuery&LANG=ADQL&MAXREC=200&FORMAT=votable&QUERY=SELECT+TOP+1000+*+from+ivoa.ObsCore+where+INTERSECTS(circle('',269.5568333,-31.6423611,0.25),+s_region)=1 

This URL will return any dataset whose footprint (s_region) intersects the mentioned cone.

or/and via the SSAP for 1d-spectra:

http://archive.eso.org/ssap?REQUEST=queryData&POS=269.556833333334,-31.6423611111111&SIZE=0.5

specifying the position in decimal degrees, a querying in a cone of 0.25 degrees radius around it.

(See the Programmatic Access Forum for more information) 

We hope our answer was useful!

Chiara (ASG) 

Ah, I see! In this case, panning away is not enough to remove the object selection. You are also right that cleaning the content of the search box does not work in this case. The way to proceed is to click on the small "x" on the blue box specifying the "target" on the top left of the page, on the right side of the "Archive Science Portal". Once you remove the target selection, the FoV will remain the same, but more data will appear both on the sky view and in the result table. 

I hope this clarified your doubts, if not, do not esitate to write us again!

Chiara (ASG)

Hi Ian,
are you not finding data in a specific region of the sky you are interested in, or the updating of the search as you move the FoV does not work at all, no matter which FoV you start with?
e.g. If you reset everything and you try to zoom-in do the search table and the sky view update and show data? 

Thanks for your question Ian! 

Regarding the first part: searching the data within the current FoV of the sky view is the default behaviour. As you zoom and pan using the sky view, the results are continuously adjusted according to the current field of view.

Second part: shift+left mouse click triggers a search at the current pointer position (not at the cross hair) with an initial search radius of 1 arcsec (1”). Then, the radius can be adjusted according to your preference using the drop-down menu near the top left. Note: the radius field also allows numeric input.
Cheers,
Joerg (ASG) 

Dear Nausicaa,
yes, indeed the name resolved used by the ESO graphical search interface is Sesame!
Cheers,

Chiara