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SkyView: The Visualization Portal for the Virtual Observatory
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| Over the past decade the SkyView Virtual Telescope has pioneered concepts of common, simple access to multi-wavelength data that have now begun to mature in the Virtual Observatory (VO) efforts underway in many nations. In this proposal we discuss how SkyView can build upon the nascent capabilities and protocols of the VO to provide a whole new way for astronomers to organize, explore and visualize sky data.
We propose extending SkyView to unify our view of the heavens in fundamentally new ways. Today, astronomers treat catalogs of objects and images as very different products even though they both are representations of what is in the sky. We propose to enable astronomers to revisualize catalog data helping astronomers to comprehend the huge giga-object catalogs that are now coming on-line in the astronomy community. Today, transformations between representations of large-scale structure, especially for cosmic microwave background, and conventional maps are not easily available to most astronomers and the simple approaches commonly used do not preserve as much information as they might. We propose to build transformation tools for SkyView to efficiently and robustly transform data among all useful astronomical data projections. Today, transforming image geometries is treated as a black art: most users pick the simplest possible algorithms even when they could preserve much more information at little cost in computing power. We propose to build and distribute a reference library of resampling techniques and algorithms so that users in astronomer and throughout the sciences have easy access to a variety of resampling techniques. As both a consumer and provider of VO datasets, we shall document how other users can effectively build VO-compliant data services.
The proposal takes advantage of the confluence of huge new data resources coming on-line in astronomy and the new community standards being promulgated in the Virtual Observatory to enable astronomers to flexibly visualize astronomical data. With our new approaches astronomers can more effectively realize the science potential of NASA missions and projects. Reducing the barriers to understanding and manipulating images and catalogs, our program also enlarges the pool of scientists able to use NASA data for research and makes it possible for the non-science community to participate in NASA�s science programs. |
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