On Monday 13 June 2022, the Strasbourg Astronomical Data Centre (CDS) publishes the Data Release 3 of the ESA Gaia mission in the CDS services. This major data release coincides with the 50th anniversary year of the operations of the CDS (1972-2022), making it an ideal time to celebrate the integration of the 1.8 billion stars from Gaia DR3!
The CDS is a partner data centre for the publication of the Gaia DR3. The data are available in the CDS services VizieR, Aladin and the CDS catalogue cross matching service. The inclusion of these data into the CDS makes them interoperable with all of the CDS reference data including 22 000 catalogues and more than 1000 image surveys. Aladin and Aladin Lite visualisers provide an interactive all-sky view of the entire DR3 using the Hierarchical Progressive Survey (HiPS - https://aladin.cds.unistra.fr/hips/) system.
Gaia DR3 contains a main catalogue of 1 811 709 771 astrophysical sources with their positions, parallaxes, proper motions, radial velocities for 33 812 183 stars and many other source properties. In the CDS VizieR catalogue service the Gaia DR3 data are organized into 70 different tables, including tables with visualization plots for the spectra and time series.
The CDS is a data centre for reference astronomy data. It was created in 1972 and is integrated within the Strasbourg Astronomical Observatory (ObAS - https://astro.unistra.fr/en/). CDS is labeled as a Research Infrastructure by the French Ministry of Higher Education and Research. The CDS is also one of the major actors of the development of the international Virtual Observatory and promotion of Open Science in astronomy. In 2022 CDS is celebrating its 50th anniversary year.
