In recent years there has been an incredibly large investment of efforts in the scientific community in obtaining high-resolution stellar spectra for determining various properties of stars. This information is crucial to answer fundamental questions in astronomy by constraining the formation and evolution scenarios of the Milky Way as well as the stars and planets residing in it.

The variety of data available nowadays has naturally led to the growth of a variety of analysis methods, codes and line lists. Within a Virtual Mobility Grant funded by COST Action CA18104, Laia Casamiquela, postdoctoral research at the Observatoire de Paris (Meudon), has built a virtual platform which provides an organised summary of the different existing public resources and databases for stellar spectroscopic analysis. The webpage is particularly addressed (but not only) to young career researchers, since it provides the large-scale panorama of available tools, and allows to take educated decisions of which is the appropriate method to use for a particular scientific objective.

The platform uses “Trello”, a project management tool which allows the organization of a project in a visual and comprehensive way. In addition, it is a collaborative environment where different invited members can modify and add information. It is conceived as a white board, filled with lists of sticky notes, where each note is a resource.

Getting to know the platform

The platform includes, first, basic recommended literature, and also, it gathers different resources publicly available (called “cards”) organized in different categories (called “columns”). The following categories are created:

• Radiative transfer codes
• Line lists
• Packages for equivalent width measures
• Wrappers for the determination of atmospheric parameters and abundances
• Abel-fitting approaches.

For each category we include a short description of the type of resources that it has, information about what they are used for and which are the underlying physical assumptions. Then, a card is created for each spotted resource/code/database, and it includes: a short description of its general characteristics, a link to the download web page (and tutorial, if available), and the reference paper where it is presented to the scientific community. For now, 29 resources widely used by the stellar spectroscopy community have been gathered.

The webpage will be constantly under update, once new tools will become public, they will be included. If you are interested in describing and advertising your open access resource in this page, you can do it also yourself following the provided guidelines in the “Aims and contributors” card.