It's great when you get the chance to meet up with a group of your most talented, creative friends and push the frontiers of what you can accomplish. That's what is happening this week at the Tag Get Use Workshop at the Spitzer Science Center.

Experts in the field of astronomy visualization have come from around the world to brainstorm new features in the standard known as Astronomy Visualization Metadata (AVM). This is the same technology that underlies the Spitzer image gallery that enables us to embed all the descriptive information you see on the webpage into the images you can download from the site.

Images from NASA's Spitzer and Chandra observatories are already available with AVM tags, and expect Hubble, ESO, and other observatories to start making them available too. As we work through the technical issues this week we will be enabling a new generation of astronomy software that will let you see images where they belong in the sky and learn more about the observatories and data that produced what you see. 

We will be blogging more about AVM and what you can do with the images from Spitzer and other websites in the coming weeks. And as we implement the results of the workshop expect to see even cooler things coming online in the coming year.

Stay tuned!