ESA Sky: a new Astronomy Multi-Mission Interface
Bruno Merín
Sign up for access to the world's latest research
checkGet notified about relevant papers
checkSave papers to use in your research
checkJoin the discussion with peers
checkTrack your impact
Abstract
We present a science-driven discovery portal for all the ESA Astronomy Missions called ESA Sky that allow users to explore the multi-wavelength sky and to seamlessly retrieve science-ready data in all ESA Astronomy mission archives from a web application without prior-knowledge of any of the missions. The first public beta 1 of the service has been released, currently featuring an interface for exploration of the multi-wavelength sky and for single and/or multiple target searches of science-ready imaging data and catalogues. Future releases will enable retrieval of spectra and will have special time-domain exploration features. From a technical point of view, the system offers progressive multi-resolution all-sky projections of full mission datasets using a new generation of HEALPix projections called HiPS, developed at the CDS; detailed geometrical footprints to connect the all-sky mosaics to individual observations; and direct access to science-ready data at the underlying mission-specific science archives.
Key takeaways
- In order to define the best possible interface to the data from ESA Astronomy missions, in 2014, ESA polled scientists at its ESAC and ESTEC Establishments for the ingredients of an ideal interface to data.
- From a technical point of view, it the system offers progressive multi-resolution all-sky projections of full mission datasets using a new generation of HEALPix projections called HiPS (Fernique et al. 2015), developed at the CDS; detailed geometrical footprints to connect the all-sky mosaics to individual observations; and direct access to science-ready data at the underlying mission-specific science archives.
- The user is shown a sky in optical and allowed to explore by zooming and panning to any place of the sky, choose which wavelength or frequency to look at (from γ-ray to radio wavelengths) and search for single targets or target lists.
- This beta version contains the imaging datasets and catalogues from the following ESA Astronomy missions : • 13 years of data in the Gamma-ray domain from INTEGRAL 2 : all-sky maps and 2077 γ-ray sources.
- https://support.cosmos.esa.int/esdc/ Astronomy data centers wishing to link their data holdings through ESA Sky are welcome to do so and should consult the simple instructions at:
Related papers
VISUALISATION OF MULTI-MISSION ASTRONOMICAL DATA WITH ESASKY
ESASky is a science-driven discovery portal to explore the multi-wavelength sky and visualise and access multiple astronomical archive holdings. The tool is a web application that requires no prior knowledge of any of the missions involved and gives users worldwide simplified access to the highest-level science data products from multiple astronomical space-based astronomy missions plus a number of ESA source catalogues. The first public release of ESASky features interfaces for the visualisation of the sky in multiple wavelengths, the visualisation of query results summaries, and the visualisation of observations and catalogue sources for single and multiple targets. This paper describes these features within ESASky, developed to address use cases from the scientific community. The decisions regarding the visualisation of large amounts of data and the technologies used were made in order to maximise the responsiveness of the application and to keep the tool as useful and intuitive as possible.
SkyPortal: An Astronomical Data Platform
Journal of Open Source Software
SkyPortal is a web application that stores and interactively displays astronomical datasets for annotation, analysis, and discovery. It is designed to be modular and extensible, so it can be customized for various scientific use cases. It is released under the Modified BSD license. SkyPortal was designed with time-series survey data from the Zwicky Transient Facility, and eventually The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, in mind. By default, it aims to provide a useful, rich user experience, including light curves of named astronomical events/transients, spectra, live chat, and links to other surveys. But the intent, ultimately, is for the frontend to be modified to best suit the specific scientific problem at hand. The current UI/UX was inspired by that developed for the Palomar Transient Factory (PTF) Marshal (Law et al., 2009).
Data Visualization in the ESA Science Archives and ESA Virtual Observatory
ESA Science Archives and ESA VO Tools are designed to ensure easy handling of mission data for the Scientific Community, allowing customized searches, display of data and related meta-data and download of products. The Archives provide a centralized way to visualize the same data using different ESA or external applications depending on its characteristics.
AAS WorldWide Telescope: A Seamless, Cross-platform Data Visualization Engine for Astronomy Research, Education, and Democratizing Data
The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, 2018
The American Astronomical Society's WorldWide Telescope (WWT) project enables terabytes of astronomical images, data, and stories to be viewed and shared among researchers, exhibited in science museums, projected into full-dome immersive planetariums and virtual reality headsets, and taught in classrooms from middle school to college levels. We review the WWT ecosystem, how WWT has been used in the astronomical community, and comment on future directions.
FitsMap: A simple, lightweight tool for displaying interactive astronomical image and catalog data
Astronomy and Computing
The visual inspection of image and catalog data continues to be a valuable aspect of astronomical data analysis. As the scale of astronomical image and catalog data continues to grow, visualizing the data becomes increasingly difficult. In this work, we introduce FitsMap, a simple, lightweight tool for visualizing astronomical image and catalog data. FitsMap only requires a simple web server and can scale to over gigapixel images with tens of millions of sources. Further, the web-based visualizations can be viewed performantly on mobile devices. FitsMap is implemented in Python and is open source (https://github.com/ryanhausen/fitsmap).
The ALADIN interactive sky atlas
Astronomy and Astrophysics Supplement Series, 2000
The Aladin interactive sky atlas, developed at CDS, is a service providing simultaneous access to digitized images of the sky, astronomical catalogues, and databases. The driving motivation is to facilitate direct, visual comparison of observational data at any wavelength with images of the optical sky, and with reference catalogues. The set of available sky images consists of the STScI Digitized Sky Surveys, completed with high resolution images of crowded regions scanned at the MAMA facility in Paris.
Astronomical research in the next decade: trends, barriers and needs in data access, management, visualization and analysis
arXiv: Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics, 2020
We report the outcomes of a survey that explores the current practices, needs and expectations of the astrophysics community, concerning four research aspects: open science practices, data access and management, data visualization, and data analysis. The survey, involving 329 professionals from several research institutions, pinpoints significant gaps in matters such as results reproducibility, availability of visual analytics tools and adoption of Machine Learning techniques for data analysis. This research is conducted in the context of the H2020 NEANIAS project.
AstroPortal: a science gateway for large-scale astronomy data analysis
TeraGrid Conference, 2006
The creation of large digital sky surveys presents the astronomy community with tremendous scientific opportunities. However, these astronomy datasets are generally terabytes in size and contain hundreds of millions of objects separated into millions of files—factors that make many analyses impractical to perform on small computers. To address this problem, we have developed a Web Services-based system, AstroPortal, that uses grid computing to federate large computing and storage resources for dynamic analysis of ...
The UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS)
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 2007
We describe the goals, design, implementation, and initial progress of the UKIRT Infrared Deep Sky Survey (UKIDSS), a seven-year sky survey which began in 2005 May. UKIDSS is being carried out using the UKIRT Wide Field Camera (WFCAM), which has the largestétendue of any infrared astronomical instrument to date. It is a portfolio of five survey components covering various combinations of the filter set ZYJHK and H 2. The Large Area Survey, the Galactic Clusters Survey, and the Galactic Plane Survey cover approximately 7000 deg 2 to a depth of K ∼ 18; the Deep Extragalactic Survey covers 35 deg 2 to K ∼ 21, and the Ultra Deep Survey covers 0.77 deg 2 to K ∼ 23. Summed together UKIDSS is 12 times larger in effective volume than the 2MASS survey. The prime aim of UKIDSS is to provide a long-term astronomical legacy data base; the design is, however, driven by a series of specific goalsfor example, to find the nearest and faintest substellar objects, to discover Population II brown dwarfs, if they exist, to determine the substellar mass function, to break the z = 7 quasar barrier; to determine the epoch of re-ionization, to measure the growth of structure from z = 3 to the present day, to determine the epoch of spheroid formation, and to map the Milky Way through the dust, to several kpc. The survey data are being uniformly processed. Images and catalogues are being made available through a fully queryable user interface-the WFCAM Science Archive (http://surveys.roe.ac.uk/wsa). The data are being released in stages. The data are immediately public to astronomers in all ESO member states, and available to the world after 18 months. Before the formal survey began, UKIRT and the UKIDSS consortia collaborated in obtaining and analysing a series of small science verification (SV) projects to complete the commissioning of the camera. We show some results from these SV projects
Fast interactive web-based data visualizer of panoramic spectroscopic surveys
2021
Panoramic IFU spectroscopy is a core tool of modern observational astronomy and is especially important for galaxy physics. Many massive IFU surveys, such as SDSS MaNGA (10k targets), SAMI (3k targets), Califa (600 objects), Atlas3D (260 objects) have recently been released and made publicly available to the broad astronomical community. The complexity and massiveness of the derived data products from spectral cubes makes visualization of the entire dataset challenging, but nevertheless very important and crucial for scientific output. Based on our past experience with visualization of spectral and imaging data built in the frame of the VOxAstro Initiative projects, we are now developing online web service for interactive visualizing spectroscopic IFU datasets (ifu.voxastro.org). Our service will provide a convenient access and visualization tool for spectral cubes from publicly available surveys (MaNGA, SAMI, Califa, Atlas3D) and results of their modeling, as well as maps of parame...
Related papers
Sky in Google Earth: The Next Frontier in Astronomical Data Discovery and Visualization
Arxiv preprint arXiv: …, 2007
Scisoft -- A Collection of Astronomical Software for ESO Users
The European Southern Observatory operates four geographically separated sites, the headquarters in Germany and an office and two observatories at separate remote locations in Chile. Staff astronomers, fellows, students and visitors are active at all four sites and need appropriate software tools. In the past these requirements were addressed by local computer management staff in response to requests. This resulted in different tools being available at different sites, often in different versions and with different levels of support. These differences often resulted in inconvenience, particularly for visitors. In an attempt to address these problems a project called ``Scisoft" was established within ESO. Scisoft has put together a standardized collection of software in three versions covering the supported computer platforms within the organization - Solaris, HP-UX and Linux. The contents of the collection are determined by the demands of users at all sites and standardized for...
INES: The Next Generation Astronomical Data Distribution System
2001
The IUE Archive was the first astronomical archive to be made accessible on-line, back in 1985, when the World Wide Web didn't even exist. The archive stores more than 110000 spectra which span nearly two decades of Ultraviolet Astronomy. The IUE Newly Extracted Spectra System (INES), a complete astronomical archive and its associated data distribution system, was developed with the goal of delivering IUE data to the scientific community in a simple and efficient form. Data distribution is structured into three levels: a Principal Centre at LAEFF (Laboratory for Space Astronomy and Theoretical Physics, owned by the Spanish National Institute for Aerospace Technology) and its Mirror at CADC, a number of National Hosts (currently 22), and an unlimited number of end users. The INES Principal Centre can be reached at http://ines.vilspa.esa.es.
Science with the Virtual Observatory: the AstroGrid VO Desktop
Arxiv preprint arXiv:0906.1535, 2009
We introduce a general range of science drivers for using the Virtual Observatory (VO) and identify some common aspects to these as well as the advantages of VO data access. We then illustrate the use of existing VO tools to tackle multi wavelength science problems. We demonstrate the ease of multi mission data access using the VOExplorer resource browser, as provided by Astro-Grid (http://www.astrogrid.org) and show how to pass the various results into any VO enabled tool such as TopCat for catalogue correlation. VOExplorer offers a powerful data-centric visualisation for browsing and filtering the entire VO registry using an iTunes type interface. This allows the user to bookmark their own personalised lists of resources and to run tasks on the selected resources as desired. We introduce an example of how more advanced querying can be performed to access existing X-ray cluster of galaxies catalogues and then select extended only X-ray sources as candidate clusters of galaxies in the 2XMMi catalogue. Finally we introduce scripted access to VO resources using python with AstroGrid and demonstrate how the user can pass on the results of such a search and correlate with e.g. optical datasets such as Sloan. Hence we illustrate the power of enabling large scale data mining of multi wavelength resources in an easily reproducible way using the VO.
The Multi-Mission Archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute (MAST)
1998
In the past year, the Multimission Archive at the Space Telescope Science Institute (MAST) has taken major steps in making MAST's holdings available using VO-defined protocols and standards, and in implementing VO-based tools. For example, MAST has implemented the Simple Cone Search protocol, and all MAST mission searches may be returned in the VOTable format, allowing other archives to use MAST data for their VO applications. We have made many of our popular High Level Science Products available through Simple Image Access Protocol (SIAP), and are implementing the VO Simple Spectral Access Protocol (SSAP). The cross correlation of VizieR catalogs with MAST missions is now possible, and illustrates the integration of VO services into MAST. The user can easily display the results from searches within MAST using the plotting tool VOPlot. MAST also participates in the NVO registry service. Thus, the user can harvest MAST holdings simultaneously with data from many other surveys and missions through the VO DataScope Data Inventory Service.
A Comparison of Large All-Sky Catalogs
Accurate positions are need to compare observations of objects made at various wavelengths, such as are to be found in the Virtual Observatory. New instruments for ground-based observing, such as multifiber spectrographs, also need very accurate positions for objects fainter than those already catalogued. Recent large catalogs have revolutionized our ability to do astrometry with CCD images. The recently published FITS World Coordinate System standard has provided a standard way of parameterizing that astrometry, and the WCSTools and SExtractor software packages allow the automation of the "plate-fitting" process. As part of a survey to be conducted with one of these new spectrographs, we have amassed 1728 15 by 30 arcminute CCD images of a portion of the northern sky. After matching image point sources to objects in each of the catalogs and fitting world coordinate systems to them using the IMWCS program, we find mean residuals between observed and catalog star positions of between 0.09 and 0.25 arcseconds for the latest catalogs.
SkyDOT (Sky Database for Objects in the Time Domain): A Virtual Observatory for Variability Studies at LANL
2002
The mining of Virtual Observatories (VOs) is becoming a powerful new method for discovery in astronomy. Here we report on the development of SkyDOT (Sky Database for Objects in the Time domain), a new Virtual Observatory, which is dedicated to the study of sky variability. The site will confederate a number of massive variability surveys and enable exploration of the time domain in astronomy. We discuss the architecture of the database and the functionality of the user interface. An important aspect of SkyDOT is that it is continuously updated in near real time so that users can access new observations in a timely manner. The site will also utilize high level machine learning tools that will allow sophisticated mining of the archive. Another key feature is the real time data stream provided by RAPTOR (RAPid Telescopes for Optical Response), a new sky monitoring experiment under construction at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL).
Science with VO tools: the AstroGrid VO Desktop
Multi Wavelength Astronomy and Virtual Observatory, 2009
We introduce a general range of science drivers for using the Virtual Observatory (VO) and identify some common aspects to these as well as the advantages of VO data access. We then illustrate the use of existing VO tools to tackle multi wavelength science problems. We demonstrate the ease of multi mission data access using the VOExplorer resource browser, as provided by Astro-Grid (http://www.astrogrid.org) and show how to pass the various results into any VO enabled tool such as TopCat for catalogue correlation. VOExplorer offers a powerful data-centric visualisation for browsing and filtering the entire VO registry using an iTunes type interface. This allows the user to bookmark their own personalised lists of resources and to run tasks on the selected resources as desired. We introduce an example of how more advanced querying can be performed to access existing X-ray cluster of galaxies catalogues and then select extended only X-ray sources as candidate clusters of galaxies in the 2XMMi catalogue. Finally we introduce scripted access to VO resources using python with AstroGrid and demonstrate how the user can pass on the results of such a search and correlate with e.g. optical datasets such as Sloan. Hence we illustrate the power of enabling large scale data mining of multi wavelength resources in an easily reproducible way using the VO.
INES: Astronomy Data Distribution for the Future
2000
We describe here the structure under which the IUE Project will leave its archive at the completion of the distribution system and final data processing, within the INES system. The INES system is a total system, which comprises both the data in their final bulk processing mode for direct application to scientific analysis, as well as the software driving the distributed service for data retrieval directly by the end user. As a consequence of the expected long-term usage and support needs, it has been designed to require minimum maintenance costs and will not suffer single point failures because of the distributed nature. Integration of the INES system in a more general multi-wavelength archive for specialized analysis is anticipated to be relatively easy, so further evolution of the data availability will be driven fully by the users community and will evolve as the data needs of the community develop. The long term responsibility will be transferred from ESA to the astronomical community through the establishment of the INES Principal Centre at the LAEFF Institute of INTA in Spain.
Loading Preview
Sorry, preview is currently unavailable. You can download the paper by clicking the button above.