The Application of the Montage Image Mosaic Engine To The Visualization Of Astronomical Images

The Montage Image Mosaic Engine was designed as a scalable toolkit, written in C for performance and portability across *nix platforms, that assembles FITS images into mosaics. The code is freely available and has been widely used in the astronomy and IT communities for research, product generation and for developing next-generation cyber-infrastructure. Recently, it has begun to finding applicability in the field of visualization. This has come about because the toolkit design allows easy integration into scalable systems that process data for subsequent visualization in a browser or client. And it includes a visualization tool suitable for automation and for integration into Python: mViewer creates, with a single command, complex multi-color images overlaid with coordinate displays, labels, and observation footprints, and includes an adaptive image histogram equalization method that preserves the structure of a stretched image over its dynamic range. The Montage toolkit contains functionality originally developed to support the creation and management of mosaics but which also offers value to visualization: a background rectification algorithm that reveals the faint structure in an image; and tools for creating cutout and down-sampled versions of large images. Version 5 of Montage offers support for visualizing data written in HEALPix sky-tessellation scheme, and functionality for processing and organizing images to comply with the TOAST sky-tessellation scheme required for consumption by the World Wide Telescope (WWT). Four online tutorials enable readers to reproduce and extend all the visualizations presented in this paper.Comment: 16 pages, 9 figures; accepted for publication in the PASP Special Focus Issue: Techniques and Methods for Astrophysical Data Visualizatio

The SSDC contribution to the improvement of knowledge by means of 3D data projections of minor bodies

The latest developments of planetary exploration missions devoted to minor bodies required new solutions to correctly visualize and analyse data acquired over irregularly shaped bodies. ASI Space Science Data Center (SSDC-ASI, formerly ASDC-ASI Science Data Center) worked on this task since early 2013, when started developing the web tool MATISSE (Multi-purpose Advanced Tool for the Instruments of the Solar System Exploration) mainly focused on the Rosetta/ESA space mission data. In order to visualize very high-resolution shape models, MATISSE uses a Python module (vtpMaker), which can also be launched as a stand-alone command-line software. MATISSE and vtpMaker are part of the SSDC contribution to the new challenges imposed by the "orbital exploration" of minor bodies: 1) MATISSE allows to search for specific observations inside datasets and then analyse them in parallel, providing high-level outputs; 2) the 3D capabilities of both tools are critical in inferring information otherwise difficult to retrieve for non-spherical targets and, as in the case for the GIADA instrument onboard Rosetta, to visualize data related to the coma. New tasks and features adding valuable capabilities to the minor bodies SSDC tools are planned for the near future thanks to new collaborations