The many facets of the Aladin project
Abstract
Aladin is one of the key services in CDS, aimed at visualizing images of the sky together with additional information. Indeed, since the beginning, more than 30 years ago, the scope of the project has been to put astronomical images in context with other CDS and external databases including multi-wavelength images, astronomical objects from SIMBAD, catalogues from VizieR, fields of view …
Today, the Aladin project covers 2 different clients: Aladin Desktop for a full experience and Aladin Lite for a visualization in the browser. For Python notebook users, the ipyaladin widget is also available. We host 700TB of image data products internally and are connected to a large international network for many more. Easy access and browsing to images at all scales is done thanks to Hierarchical Progressive Surveys (HiPS), a standard developed at CDS and now widely used even beyond images. We provide two associated services: HiPS2FITS for image cutouts and Hipsgen to transform a set of images into HiPS.
This seminar will provide a full glimpse at the Aladin project, from its basic (but important) general use to an overview of different aspects for data discovery, visualization and scientific usage.