arXiv subjects

Henrik Norman

Publications and source records attributed to Henrik Norman.

6 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2022

A Novel JupyterLab User Experience for Interactive Data Visualization

In the Jupyter ecosystem, data visualization is usually done with "widgets" created as notebook cell outputs. While this mechanism works well in some circumstances, it is not well-suited to presenting interfaces that are long-lived, interactive, and visually rich. Unlike the traditional Jupyter notebook system, the newer JupyterLab application provides a sophisticated extension infrastructure that raises new design possibilities. Here we present a novel user experience (UX) for interactive data visualization in JupyterLab that is based on an "app" that runs alongside the user's notebooks, rather than widgets that are bound inside them. We have implemented this UX for the AAS WorldWide Telescope (WWT) visualization tool. JupyterLab's messaging APIs allow the app to smoothly exchange data with multiple computational kernels, allowing users to accomplish tasks that are not possible using the widget framework. A new Jupyter server extension allows the frontend to request data from kernels asynchronously over HTTP, enabling interactive exploration of gigapixel-scale imagery in WWT. While we have developed this UX for WWT, the overall design and the server extension are portable to other applications and have the potential to unlock a variety of new user activities that aren't currently possible in "science platform" interfaces.

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arXiv2022

The Astropy Project: Sustaining and Growing a Community-oriented Open-source Project and the Latest Major Release (v5.0) of the Core Package

The Astropy Project supports and fosters the development of open-source and openly-developed Python packages that provide commonly needed functionality to the astronomical community. A key element of the Astropy Project is the core package $\texttt{astropy}$, which serves as the foundation for more specialized projects and packages. In this article, we summarize key features in the core package as of the recent major release, version 5.0, and provide major updates for the Project. We then discuss supporting a broader ecosystem of interoperable packages, including connections with several astronomical observatories and missions. We also revisit the future outlook of the Astropy Project and the current status of Learn Astropy. We conclude by raising and discussing the current and future challenges facing the Project.

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arXiv2019

astroquery: An Astronomical Web-Querying Package in Python

astroquery is a collection of tools for requesting data from databases hosted on remote servers with interfaces exposed on the internet, including those with web pages but without formal application program interfaces (APIs). These tools are built on the Python requests package, which is used to make HTTP requests, and astropy, which provides most of the data parsing functionality. astroquery modules generally attempt to replicate the web page interface provided by a given service as closely as possible, making the transition from browser-based to command-line interaction easy. astroquery has received significant contributions from throughout the astronomical community, including several significant contributions from telescope archives. astroquery enables the creation of fully reproducible workflows from data acquisition through publication. This paper describes the philosophy, basic structure, and development model of the astroquery package. The complete documentation for astroquery can be found at http://astroquery.readthedocs.io/.

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arXiv2018

ESASky : A Science-Driven Discovery Portal for Space-Based Astronomy Missions

In the era of "big data" and with the advent of web 2.0 technologies, ESASky (http://sky.esa.int) aims at providing a modern and visual way to access astronomical science-ready data products and metadata. The main goal of the application is to simplify the interaction between the scientific community and the ever-growing amount of data collected over the past decades from the most important astronomy missions. The ESASky concept is to offer a complementary scientific application to the more-traditional table-oriented exploitation of astronomical data, by allowing a more natural and visual approach and enabling the exploration of astronomical objects across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. To fulfill this goal, ESASky provides a multiwavelength interface to a set of astronomy data from an increasing number of missions and surveys, with the intention of becoming the single-point of entry to perform visual analysis and cross-matching among different energy ranges. A lot of effort has been invested on the design of a user-friendly, responsive Graphical User Interface (GUI) by the definition and optimisation of algorithms running behind each visual feature offered. In this contribution, we describe in detail the design and solutions adopted for the technical challenges arising during the development. We present the data services and features implemented in the latest version of ESASky (v2.1), including a Mission Planning Tool to support current James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) planning, the possibility to search for observations of Solar System Objects (planets, comets and moons) taken by astronomy missions, the integration of the SAO/NASA Astrophysics Data System (ADS) publication system in the ESASky GUI, and the retrieval of metadata and data products available within a specific region of the sky.

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arXiv2017

ESASky v.2.0: all the skies in your browser

With the goal of simplifying the access to science data to scientists and citizens, ESA recently released ESASky (http://sky.esa.int), a new open-science easy-to-use portal with the science-ready Astronomy data from ESA and other major data providers. In this presentation, we announced version 2.0 of the application, which includes access to all science-ready images, catalogues and spectra, a feature to help planning of future JWST observations, the possibility to search for data of all (targeted and serendipitously observed) Solar System Objects in Astronomy images, a first support to mobile devices and several other smaller usability features. We also discussed the future evolution of the portal and the lessons learnt from the 1+ year of operations from the point of view of access, visualization and manipulation of big datasets (all sky maps, also called HiPS) and large catalogues (like e.g. the Gaia DR1 catalogues or the Hubble Source Catalogue) and the design and validation principles for the development of friendly GUIs for thin layer web clients aimed at scientists.

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arXiv2016

ESASky: The whole of space Astronomy at your fingertips

ESASky is a new science-driven discovery portal for all ESA astronomical missions that gives users worldwide a simplified access to high-level science-ready products from ESA and other data providers. The tool features a sky exploration interface and a single/multiple target interface, and it requires no prior knowledge of specific details of each mission. Users can explore the sky in multiple wavelengths, quickly see the data available for their targets, and retrieve the relevant products, with just a few clicks. The first version of the tool, released in May 2016, provides access to imaging data and a number of catalogues. Future releases will enable retrieval of spectroscopic data and will incorporate futures to allow time-domain exploration and the study of Solar System objects.

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