“Interactively Visualizing Massive Images and Catalogs in Jupyter with AAS WorldWide Telescope”

Cape Town, South Africa and online; 2021 October 24–28

We look forward to welcoming attendees to this focus demo! The event will take place at 9 PM SAST (= 19:00 UTC) and be conducted virtually.

Abstract

Modern astronomical datasets are, of course, bigger than ever. Not only are they often too big to fit in most computers’ memories, more and more frequently they’re too big to even download at all. While the astronomical community has converged on a big-picture approach to this challenge — the web-based “science platform” concept — numerous smaller-scale engineering problems still need to be solved before astronomers will be fully equipped to handle the upcoming data deluge. In particular, the switch to browser-based UIs creates a need — and an opportunity — for web-native, interactive data visualization tools. This Focus Demo will showcase new capabilities that have recently been added to AAS WorldWide Telescope that empower users to interactively explore catalogs with billions of rows (using the HiPS progressive standard) and imagery with billions of pixels (using HiPS and tiled FITS formats). These features are tightly integrated with JupyterLab to provide one-click startup and dead-simple linkage with Python notebooks for data analysis. WWT’s efficient WebGL-based rendering is paired with a suite of user-friendly data-processing tools that make it easy to prepare data for visualization.