Aladin Astro Download
Kum Alcini
Aladin is an interactive software sky atlas, created in France. It allows the user to visualize digitized astronomical images, superimpose entries from astronomical catalogues or databases, and interactively access related data and information from the SIMBAD database, the VizieR service and other archives for all known sources in the field.[1]
This page was created by Eric Jensen. Thistool is part of the Tapirpackage for planning astronomical observations; the source code isfreely available. You can also make airmass plots, or plan transiting exoplanet observations.
We (the TolTEC Project) have developed Dash application for planning the astronomical observations using the TolTEC Camera, an mm-wavelength imager/polarimeter mounted on the Large Millimeter Telescope:
Detailed Goal: The function will perform a coordinate query using astroquery and simbad. Ideally, it will be able to access the database of objects within the given region centered at (ra, dec). Hence, some size parameter will also be input (FoV, or radius). But mainly, when a query is done on the simbad through browser, there is an option to plot the star region centered at the input coordinates, made by AladinLite, and the function should return this image (hopefully as a FITS image).
What I've tried: Everything I've tried to get here has been discovering the use of astroquery and simbad. But I cannot find anything in the documentation on how the image from AladinLite can be obtained through astroquery. Finding a way to get an image straight from Aladin using Python doesn't seem possible either.
So you have the first part of your workflow right: You would use astroquery to query Simbad. But then you need to query for the image data. There's no Python-specific API for this yet, but the web API is well documented, so it's mostly a matter of constructing the correct URL. Here's an example workflow I came up with using the same coordinates from the screenshot you gave:
Now for plotting. The various markers and ticks seen in the AladinLite preview are generated by the AladinLite viewer itself, so using a Python-based workflow it's now on you to provide your own plotting. There are many ways to go about this. You could now save the FITS image and use whatever plotting tools you already have available. Though for a pure-Python workflow, the aplpy package is designed specifically for astronomy plots. Here's what I did with this image, just as an example:
Aladin is an interactive software sky atlas allowing the user to visualize digitized astronomical images, superimpose entries from astronomical catalogues or databases, and interactively access related data and information from the Simbad database, the VizieR service and other archives for all known sources in the field.
astrophotoerik Meet the Fighting Dragons of Ara, or NGC 6188 by t This is M42, or the Orion Nebula, the red and whit NGC 535 is a prominent elliptical galaxy located i The Crab Nebula is the remnant of a supernova expl This is an image of Messier 27, or the Dumbbell Ne Say Hello to Messier 71, a unique globular cluster A closeup view of the Eastern Veil Nebula, or NGC This is the bright star Alpha Centauri, the closes Load More Follow on Instagram
As of today, it is used by a quite large community of people passionated about astronomy (scientists as well as amateurs) such as the ESA sky project which uses Aladin Lite for its rendering engine.
Aladin Lite is GPL licensed, do not hesitate to take a look at the repo, make issues, contribute, etc...
In particular the branch develop features the Rust/WebGL2 code:
-astro/aladin-lite
Astro Mosaic would not be possible without Aladin Sky Atlas and Aladin Lite. Aladin Sky Atlas is a great interactive map created from digitized astronomical images. It is simply amazing that such a great resource is available. And it is totally free!
Sometimes in 2018, very early in my astrophotography hobby, I wanted to image Western Veil Nebula. It did not fit into the telescope field of view so I started working on a three panel mosaic. I used Stellarium to approximately find correct coordinates. I managed to get the mosaic done but it was a very random process. I started to look for some tools to calculate mosaic coordinates but failed to find any free ones. So I decided to learn something new and do the coordinate calculations myself. I did the first version in Python but soon found out about Aladin Sky Atlas. With that I could do even better and see the actual framing on the sky atlas on a web page. After that I have added more functionality like visibility charts and different catalogs for finding targets.
I was a computer science student so I developed a very unique way of reading charts. I call it Algorithmic pattern analysis. This method allows me even to reverse predict the combinations present in the birth chart by asking questions to the client about themselves without even knowing the birth details. I can confidently say that only 1 in THOUSAND!!! astrologers can do it, not because they lack the knowledge but because of their lack of interest in research.
An astrophotographer is like a tour guide of the cosmos. In the blink of an eye, we can take viewers thousands of light-years away, drawing their attention to the best celestial sights the universe has to offer.
I have written some tools for astrophotography and after I joined Telescope Live some time ago I have updated my tools to work with Telescope Live. My tools are developed for personal use but I am sharing them in case someone is interested.
Katharina Lutz is a postdoc at the Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS). She works on gas and star formation in nearby galaxies, and the dissemination of the Virtual Observatory (VO) and the CDS services. This involves maintaining and developing tutorials, and mentoring at VO Schools. This post is the first in a series of articles on services offered by the CDS, and was written in collaboration with the CDS Python developers, who are currently working on further MOCpy and astroquery developments, and the CDS dissemination team, who are preparing for the next VO training events.
Have you ever worked on a sample of interesting sources and wanted to quickly visualise what these sources look like at different wavelengths without going through a gazillion archives? Curtain up for ipyaladin! ipyaladin allows you to embed an Aladin Lite widget in your Jupyter notebook, look at any of the 550+ available (all) sky maps, and even overlay catalogues and tables. Many image and cube surveys are already at your disposal.
One method of note is the Hierarchical Progressive Surveys (HiPS), which is a tiling mechanism for viewing image and cube data. The HiPS of many large image surveys and some 3D cube surveys, as well as large catalogues, are available through Virtual Observatory protocols via a network of 20 HiPS nodes around the world. There are a number of HiPS viewers, including the ones developed by the CDS: Aladin desktop and Aladin Lite. The ipyaladin package for Python is an interactive Aladin Lite widget that can be used in your Jupyter notebook. An example is shown in the animation below.
Hi Max,
thanks for your nice comment. Unfortunately, an observation planning tool is not yet implemented in Aladin Lite and thus ipyaladin. However, as more and more people ask for it, we are looking into it.
Best wishes,
Katharina
This metapackage will install software for the interactive visual inspectionof astronomical data. Note that Python packages can be used for interactiveinspection as well within the ipython environment.
Aladin is an interactive software sky atlas allowing the user tovisualise digitised astronomical images, to superimpose entries fromastronomical catalogues or databases, and to interactively accessrelated data and information from the Simbad database, the VizieRservice and other archives for all known sources in the field.
Created in 1999 by the Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg(CDS), Aladin has become a widely-used tool of the VirtualObservatory (VO) framework capable of addressing challenges such aslocating data of interest, accessing and exploring distributeddatasets, and visualising multi-wavelength data. Compliance withexisting or emerging VO standards, interconnection with othervisualisation or analysis tools, and the ability to easily compareheterogeneous data are the key topics which allow Aladin to be apowerful data exploration and integration tool.
Ginga is a toolkit designed for building viewers for scientific imagedata in Python, visualizing 2D pixel data in numpy arrays.It can view astronomical data such as contained in files based on theFITS (Flexible Image Transport System) file format. It is written andis maintained by software engineers at the Subaru Telescope, NationalAstronomical Observatory of Japan.
SAOImage DS9 is an astronomical imaging and data visualizationapplication. DS9 supports FITS images and binary tables, multiple framebuffers, region manipulation, and many scale algorithms and colormaps. Itprovides for easy communication with external analysis tasks and is highlyconfigurable and extensible via XPA and SAMP.
The SER file format can be used to store data from fast frame rate astronomycameras instead of using the AVI file format. This application enables usersto review SER files in the same way that AVI files are reviewed with a videoplayer.
The ESO/Starlink Skycat tool combines the image display capabilitiesof the RTD (Real-Time Display) with a set of classes for accessingastronomical catalogs locally and over the network using HTTP. The toolallows you to view FITS images from files or from the Digitized SkySurvey (DSS).
TOPCAT is an interactive graphical viewer and editor for tabulardata. Its aim is to provide most of the facilities that astronomersneed for analysis and manipulation of source catalogues and othertables, though it can be used for non-astronomical data as well. Itunderstands a number of different astronomically important formats(including FITS and VOTable) and more formats can be added.
760c119bf3