Aladin Sky Atlas

Aladin is an interactive sky atlas for visualizing digitized astronomical images and full surveys, superimposing entries from astronomical catalogues, and accessing related data from databases such as Simbad and VizieR for objects in the field. It is distributed under the GPL v3 licence.

The tool is available in two modes: Aladin Desktop, a Java application installed on the user's machine, and Aladin Lite, a WebGL-based web application embeddable in pages and controllable through a JavaScript API. Both use HiPS (Hierarchical Progressive Survey) data for zooming and panning across surveys. Aladin Desktop provides direct access to astronomical servers including CDS, NED, ESO, CADC, MAST, HEASARC, NRAO, ROE and IMCCE, as well as local data, and supports multi-wavelength visualization and VO standards. An ipyaladin widget is available for Python notebooks, and an experimental viewer exists for planetary surfaces.