• Introduction
• HiPS in action
• Documentation
• Tools
• Ingestion strategy
• Outreach

HiPS : Hierarchical Progressive Surveys

HiPS is the hierarchical tiling mechanism which allows one to access, visualize and browse seamlessly image, catalogue and cube data.

This page provides links to HiPS documentations and tools notably to generate progressive surveys from your own datasets.

Image and catalogue HiPS visualized in Aladin Lite

The Aladin Lite application above gives you an overview of what HiPS are. Zoom in on a particular region and better resolution tiles for the DSS2 background survey will be loaded. Red square represent SIMBAD objects. Zooming in will reveal more and more sources.

1280 HiPS are currently available from twenty HiPS servers.

The HiPS method is developped by CDS since 2009. In October 2015, the International Virtual Observatory Alliance decided to standardize HiPS. The HIPS Recommendation 1.0 is available on the IVOA site.
A HiPS reference paper is also available since 2015 in A&A → 2015A&A...578A.114F.

HiPS can be visualized in Aladin Desktop (CDS), Aladin Lite (CDS), Stellarium, MIZAR (CNES), hscMap (NAOJ) and various Web pages mainly based on Aladin Lite code notably ESAsky (ESA), ESO Science portal (ESO) and JUDO2 (JAXA)).

Generate your own HiPS from image/cube data

• Batch mode: download and use Hipsgen.jar.
  Take time to read the short introduction Make your HiPS in 10 steps and/or have a look at:
  • the User manual (also available in French)
  • the Reference manual
• GUI mode: for a quick test, you can use directly Aladin Desktop,
  Menu Tools → Progressive Sky builder

Generate your own HiPS from catalogue data

• Batch mode: download and use Hipsgen-cat.jar.
  Take time to read this short tutorial: Your HiPS catalogue in a single command line.

Validate HiPS

• HiPS IVOA compatibility: download and use Hipsgen.jar with the action LINT
  java -jar Hipsgen.jar out="directory" LINT
• HiPS list IVOA compatibility: download and use Hipslint.jar
  java -jar Hipslint.jar "http://urlOfHiPSlist..."

Generate FITS images cutouts

The hips2fits service allows one to generate FITS images cutouts of arbitrary size and resolution from a given HiPS.

• Immersive visualisation of all-sky surveys on your smartphone with photospheres generated from HiPS.

  

  
  

• Download paper models of sky surveys and planets

  
  
• Planetarium-friendly equirectangular all-sky maps generated from HiPS