Aladin Sky Atlas

Overview

Aladin is an interactive sky atlas allowing the user to visualize digitized astronomical images or full surveys, 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 astronomical objects in the field.

logo Download
Aladin Desktop
on your machine 		logo Preview with
Aladin Lite
in your browser

logo		 Install
ipyaladin
for Python notebooks

The Aladin sky atlas is available in two modes:

  • Aladin Desktop, a regular Desktop application
  • Aladin Lite a Javascript Web application.

Aladin Desktop

Aladin Desktop is a widely-used java tool capable of addressing challenges such as locating data of interest, accessing and exploring distributed datasets, visualizing multi-wavelength data. Compliance with existing or emerging VO standards, interconnection with other visualisation or analysis tools, ability to easily compare heterogeneous data are key topics allowing Aladin to be a powerful data exploration and integration tool as well as a science enabler. Aladin Desktop is based on Java techonology. It requires a classical installation on the user machine.

More about Aladin Desktop

Aladin Lite

Aladin Lite is a lightweight version of the Aladin tool, running in the browser and geared towards simple visualization of a sky region. Aladin Lite is powered by the WebGL technology, currently supported by any modern browser. Aladin Lite is easily embeddable on any web page and can also be controlled through a Javacript API.

Access Aladin Lite previewer


We also offer an experimental viewer to visualize planetary surfaces HiPS datasets

If you are you a developer interested in integrating Aladin Lite in your project, have a look at the dedicated documentation.

Aladin Lite is also available as a widget for Python notebooks: ipyaladin.

Access ipyaladin documentation

Available data

Aladin Desktop & Aladin Lite use reprocessed data based on HiPS technology (Hierarchical Progressive Survey) with the capability to zoom and pan on any regions of the surveys. There are about 1100+ HiPS surveys available for 500TB of pixels provided by several collaborative servers.

Aladin Desktop provides direct data access to most of the astronomical servers over the world (CDS, NED, ESO, CADC, MAST, HEASARC, NRAO, ROE, IMCCE, etc), and obviously, local user data.

Documentation

Mailing list

  • Subscribe the Aladin mailing list by sending an e-mail to sympa@unistra.fr with this unique subject subscribe astro-aladin.
  • Browse the Aladin mailing archive through this link.

Copyright

Aladin Desktop & Aladin Lite are developed by the Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg.
 Both are distributed under GPL v3 licence.

Acknowledgement

If the Aladin Sky Atlas was helpful for your research work, the following citation would be appreciated: This research has made use of "Aladin sky atlas" developed at CDS, Strasbourg Observatory, France
→ 2000A&AS..143...33B (Aladin Desktop), 2014ASPC..485..277B (Aladin Lite v2), and 2022ASPC..532....7B (Aladin Lite v3).