Visualization of the sky in Notebooks: the ipyaladin widget extension
Aladin allows to visualize images of the sky or planetary surfaces just as an astronomical "openstreetmap" app. The view can be panned and explored interactively. In the ipyaladin widget -- that brings Aladin in the Jupyter Notebook environnement -- these abilities are extended with a python API. The users can send astronomical data in standard formats back and forth the viewer and their Python code. Such data can be images of the sky in different wavelengths, but also tabular data, complex shapes that characterize telescope observation regions, or even special sky features (such as probability region for the provenance of a gravitational event).
With these already existing features, and current work we are doing with the new development framework anywidget
, ipyaladin
is really close to a version 1.0.0. It is already used in its beta version in different experimental science platforms, for example in the ESCAPE European Science Cluster of Astronomy & Particle Physics project and in the experimental SKA (Square Kilometre Array, a telescope for radio astronomy) analysis platform.
In this presentation, we will share our feedback on the development of a widget thanks to anywidget
compared to the bare ipywidget
framework. And we will demonstrate the functionalities of the widget through scientific use cases.