• Overview
• Embedding in a web page
• Javascript API
• Features
• Usage
• Source code
• Integration in Python notebooks
• Integration in mobile apps
• Showcase
• Plugins
• Release notes
• Contact

For more details and options, have a look at the tutorial Build an interactive sky map with Aladin Lite, initially developed for dotAstronomy7.

Aladin Lite comes with a full-featured API allowing one to customize its interface, control the view, change the image survey to display, create catalogues and overlay layers, develop powerful interactions between a web page and Aladin Lite.

The Aladin Lite API is described on a dedicated page.

Developers might also be interested in this tutorial, which shows step by step how to create an interactive sky map with Aladin Lite.

To give you an overview of how Aladin Lite can be used, have a look at the list of examples.

Aladin Lite has been integrated in the main CDS services:

• On the SIMBAD page for an individual object, it provides an interactive preview image (see example for Messier 1).
• The VizieR results page features a start Aladin Lite button to visualize the positions of listed sources (see example)

Outside CDS, Aladin Lite is used in several projects:

• ESO Archive Science Portal
• ESA Sky allows for discovery and access of data observed by ESA space missions
• ALMA Science Archive
• The Lasair alerts broker uses Aladin Lite on its coverage, object details and skymap pages.
• GW170814 interactive skymap displays the localisation on the sky of the gravitational wave event jointly detected by LIGO and Virgo observatories, and announced in September 2017.
• HEASARC Xamin system for discovery and data retrieval
• Skymap Viewer shows probability contours for gravitational wave events from LIGO/Virgo
• JVO Portal v2
• Gamma Sky, a portal to gamma-ray sky (developed by C. Deil and A. Voruganti)
• SETI uses Aladin Lite to display targets currently observed (development by J. Richards)
• J-PLUS DR1, a portal to access data of the First Data Release of the Javalambre-Photometric Local Universe Survey (J-PLUS)
• CEFCA images navigator and images tours
• ARCHES Walker, an Outreach tool showcasing astronomical objects in different wavelengths (ARCHES project)
• MOPRA Radio Telescope Pointing and Status
• JUDO2 (JAXA Universe Data Oriented)
• Akari explore tool
• CASSIS atlas of Spitzer Infrared Spectra
• GLIMPSE 360
• CADE (Centre d'Analyse de Données Etendues) uses Aladin Lite to provide previews of the HEALPix maps they publish (Example for CGPS data)
• ADS All-Sky Survey makes use of Aladin Lite to display heatmaps of SIMBAD objects cited in the literature.

If your project is using Aladin Lite, we would be happy to have it listed here. Drop us a line!

Aladin Lite source code is available under GPL3 licence (Download Aladin Lite source code).

ipyaladin is a Jupyter notebook widget, developed at CDS, and allowing for easy embedding and control of Aladin Lite from an IPython notebook.

Android

Ladislav Heller (ladislav.heller at gmail.com) has integrated Aladin Lite in an Android application using the Xamarin framework.
His development is available in his github repository: github.com/laheller/CDS_Aladin

iPhone

If you have integrated Aladin Lite in an iPhone application, please let us know.

This page features some experimental, original usages of Aladin Lite.

• ALiX

  ALiX is a flexible catalog portal based on Aladin Lite. It it designed to use an interactive sky view as a primary selection tool. The ALiX view is constantly updated with data queried in the host database. It offers advanced functionalities allowing to mix local data with VO data. Users can plot by hand areas of interest and manage an historic of the views.

  ALiX has no dependency with any specific data source; it can be integrated in any existing portal.

  

• Region editor

  The region editor is an Aladin Lite extension allowing users to plot polygons over the current sky view, and retrieve the coordinations of the vertices.
  It has been designed to be used as an interface for searches by region or for cutout services.
  This development has been funded by the SSC XXM-Newton.

  Documentation, installation instructions can be found on this page.

  

• Tour navigator library

  The tour navigator is an Aladin Lite extension that allows to implement easily virtual tours of objects of interest. It has been designed to be used as interface for navigating through the sky from object to object. Allowing users to learn about each object they visit in the tour. The tour navigator plugin has been developed and designed at CEFCA (Centro de Estudios de Física del Cosmos de Aragón) by Tamara Civera. Documentation, source code and installation instructions can be found on this page.

February 2019

add method getViewWCS

bug fix for MOC rendering: MOC cells at order 0 and MOC with order>13 are now properly displayed

September 2018

drawing algorithm improvement: no more flickering when zooming in

mobile devices support: pinch to zoom works, panning works better

bug fix in VOTable parsing: CDATA text was always blank in TD tags

August 2018

bug fix for rectangular selection of sources (aladin.on('select', ...))

URL generated for a VizieR cone search now take into account the option 'limit', as to limit the size of the retrieved VOTable

April 2018

add Simbad pointer tool

add startup options realFullscreen and simbadPointer

add method zoomToFoV (zoom with animation)

improve rendering of all-sky view

add option showAllskyRing

December 2017

footprint selection is enabled (Fabrizio Giordano [ESA/ESDC] contribution)

add listener for 'mouseMove' event

add dragging attribute to positionChanged listener callback param

improve positionChanged listener: no more called when clicking on an object

support Circle when generating footprints from STC-S descriptions

Catalog.onClick can now also be a function

add function udpateShape for Catalog and ProgressiveCatalog object

add shape option 'circle' for catalogues

bug fix for progressive catalogues rendering

September 2017

fix: export PNG was not working any longer in latest version of Chrome, as top frame navigation to data URL was no longer allowed

improvement: MOCs, catalogs and overlays have now different logos in the "stack"

gotoObject: can now take a success callback function

dimensions can be specified for getViewDataURL method

add listener for 'click' event

improve MOC display speed

bug fix : MOC display with norder>9 (thanks to Raffaele D'Abrusco for the bug report)

Sesame bug fix when used in a local file web page

MOC display is way faster when panning

August 2017

add adaptativeDisplay option for MOCs

try first to load MOC through given URL, and only if it fails, try through proxy (allows to load local/not publicly accessible MOCs)

all graphical overlays (footprints, MOCs) in addition to catalogs are now visible and can be shown/hidden from the control panel

fix: when going full screen, background is now all white (no more HTML elements visible in the background)

style improvement: layer labels in Overlay layers panel are rounded at both ends

add J2000d option for frame selection

July 2017

MOC display bug fix

add method adjustFovForObject

add listeners on positionChanged and zoomChanged

Sesame call now done in HTTPS

February 2017

shape parameter when creating a catalogue can now be a custom draw function

bug fix for displaying a HiPS overlaid over a HiPs with a different coordinate frame

January 2017

new method allowing direct query to SkyBot

January 2017

new method allowing direct query to SkyBot

September 2016

support of HiPS catalog (new format)

June 2016

fix astrometry offset by subdividing HEALPix cells too distorted

new method A.MOCFromJSON to create a MOC from the JSON serialization

March 2016

added raField and decField options when creating catalogue

December 2015

added cubehelix color map

added option in A.catalogFromURL to bypass proxy

access to Simbad and VizieR data (catalogFromVizieR and catalogFromSimbad) are now done directly, without the proxy

Novembre 2015

new methods getShareURL and getEmbedCode

October 2015

new methods for easy retrieval of Simbad, NED and VizieR data

new options for Catalog.onClick: 'showTable' or 'showPopup'

December 2014

added displayLabel option for a catalog overlay

added lineWidth option for A.graphicOverlay objects

October 2014

New shapes available for catalogue sources

Various bug fixes

April 2014

New API methods: getSize, getFov, world2pix, pix2world, getFovCorners

November 2013

New features: progressive catalogues, color maps, fullScreen option at startup, PNG export

New API methods: setFOVRange, listeners on objectClicked, objectHovered

Bug fix: support for Firefox < 4

July 2013

Added zoom control to the UI

Added method to trigger object selection

May 2013

First public beta release

Aladin Lite is developed and maintained by Thomas Boch.

Send your feedback, comments, feature requests and bug reports to this email address.