Matthieu Baumann
After getting a master's degree from a computer science and applied mathematics french engineering school, I was recruited by the CDS (Centre de Données de Strasbourg).
My initial tasks were to develop python packages for astroquery allowing python users to fetch catalogue data from the CDS databases. I then largely contributed to MOCpy, a python/rust library that implements the MOC IVOA standard.
Nowadays, my main work consists in developing Aladin Lite v3, a major WebGL upgrade of the visualisation web app Aladin Lite.
Session
Since its first version in 2013, Aladin Lite has gained significant traction and usage as an HiPS viewer running in the browser. Designed to be easy to embed, it is now used in more than fifty websites and portals in the professional astronomy community. Aladin Lite has been adopted as the sky visualisation component of popular applications: ESASky, ESO Science Archive or ALMA Science Archive and has been supported in the ESCAPE project as a priority for Astronomy infrastructures.
We present a major overhaul of Aladin Lite taking advantage of the GPU with WebGL, and which responds to requests of users, developers and integrators in a context where browser-based applications and science analysis platforms are increasingly important. While keeping the strengths of the original code including its API, Aladin Lite v3 introduces several new features: support of multiple projections (Aitoff, Mollweide, Orthographic, Mercator), support of FITS HiPS tiles, an improved rendering pipeline and coordinates grids. In addition to video footage sequences presenting those new features, this talk will be more focused on how users can embed Aladin Lite v3 into their own applications. This presentation also aims at Aladin Lite v2 users to upgrade to the v3 with very minimal changes to their codes.
Finally, a point will be addressed to future developments including the support of FITS images as well as a better MOC IVOA standard support.
These improvements will also benefit ipyaladin, the widget enabling the usage of Aladin Lite in Jupyter notebooks.