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.
The Aladin sky atlas is available in two modes:
Aladin Desktop, a regular application
and Aladin Lite an HTML5 javascript web widget.
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)
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 HTML5 canvas 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
(→ more).
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 550+ HiPS surveys available for
250TB 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 and 2014ASPC..485..277B.
