2016/12/28 by Deborah Baines, Fabrizio Giordano, Elena Racero +19 · 26 citations
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Astronomical Observations and Instrumentation #Astronomy and Astrophysical Research #Data access #Data visualization #Information visualization #Radio Astronomy Observations and Technology #Sky #Virtual observatory #Visualization #astro-ph.IM
paper · pdf · doi:10.1088/1538-3873/129/972/028001
published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific 129(972), 028001 (Institute of Physics) · Published in PASP; ESASky: http://sky.esa.int
openalex publication_date 2016/12/28 · openalex created_date 2017/01/06 · arxiv created 2017/01/10 · arxiv updated 2017/01/11 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
ESASky is a science-driven discovery portal to explore the multi-wavelength sky and visualize and access multiple astronomical archive holdings. The tool is a web application that requires no prior knowledge of any of the missions involved and gives users world-wide simplified access to the highest-level science data products from multiple astronomical space-based astronomy missions plus a number of ESA source catalogs. The first public release of ESASky features interfaces for the visualization of the sky in multiple wavelengths, the visualization of query results summaries, and the visualization of observations and catalog sources for single and multiple targets. This paper describes these features within ESASky, developed to address use cases from the scientific community. The decisions regarding the visualization of large amounts of data and the technologies used were made to maximize the responsiveness of the application and to keep the tool as useful and intuitive as possible.