Visualization of the sky in Notebooks: the ipyaladin widget extension
2024-09-26 , Louis Armand 2 - Ouest

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.


We write in the abstract that ipyaladin is close to its version 1.0.0, but our aim would be to present this release for the PyData event in September.
- audience: scientific public of amateur astronomers / widget developers
- background knowledge: none
- outline:
1. problematic of visualizing spherical surfaces
2. what we want to show are huge datasets (windowing of the printed data in the field of view)
3. how to provide a Python API for this viewer for the scientific community
4. the widget development process
5. (bonus: beautiful images of the sky)

Software rust/javascript developer working at the Strasbourg astronomical data center on the Aladin Lite web visualizer.

Pythonista and software engineer at Strasbourg Astronomical Data Centre.