Web-Based Visualization of Very Large Scientific Astronomy Imagery

Abstract

Visualizing and navigating through large astronomy images from a remote location with current astronomy display tools can be a frustrating experience in terms of speed and ergonomics, especially on mobile devices. In this paper, we present a high performance, versatile and robust client-server system for remote visualization and analysis of extremely large scientific images. Applications of this work include survey image quality control, interactive data query and exploration, citizen science, as well as public outreach. The proposed software is entirely open source and is designed to be generic and applicable to a variety of datasets. It provides access to floating point data at terabyte scales, with the ability to precisely adjust image settings in real-time. The proposed clients are light-weight, platform-independent web applications built on standard HTML5 web technologies and compatible with both touch and mouse-based devices. We put the system to the test and assess the performance of the system and show that a single server can comfortably handle more than a hundred simultaneous users accessing full precision 32 bit astronomy data.

arXiv commentPublished in Astronomy & Computing. IIPImage server available from http://iipimage.sourceforge.net . Visiomatic code and demos available from http://www.visiomatic.org/

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• The VizieR database of Astronomical Catalogues
• The Ninth Data Release of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey: First Spectroscopic Data from the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey
• Representations of celestial coordinates in FITS
• Lossless Astronomical Image Compression and the Effects of Noise
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• SkuareView: Client-Server Framework for Accessing Extremely Large Radio Astronomy Image Data

Cited by in corpus (9)

• The Illustris Simulation: Public Data Release
• The Dark Energy Survey Data Release 1
• The Dark Energy Survey Data Release 2
• Census and classification of low-surface-brightness structures in nearby early-type galaxies from the MATLAS survey
• The Seven Sisters DANCe. I. Empirical isochrones, Luminosity and Mass Functions of the Pleiades cluster
• The Fornax Deep Survey (FDS) with the VST XI. The search for signs of preprocessing between the Fornax main cluster and Fornax A group
• The Application of the Montage Image Mosaic Engine To The Visualization Of Astronomical Images
• Toyz: A Framework for Scientific Analysis of Large Datasets and Astronomical Images
• Vizic: A Jupyter-based Interactive Visualization Tool for Astronomical Catalogs