SlicerAstro

Astronomy (HI) extension for 3DSlicer

Upcoming HI (neutral Hydrogen) surveys will deliver large datasets, and automated processing using the full 3D information (two positional dimensions and one spectral dimension) to find and characterize HI objects is imperative.

In this context, visualization is an essential tool for enabling qualitative and quantitative human control on an automated source finding and analysis pipeline. Visual Analytics, the combination of automated data processing and human reasoning, creativity and intuition, supported by interactive visualization, enables flexible and fast interaction with the 3D data, helping the astronomer to deal with the analysis of complex sources. 3D visualization, coupled to modeling, provides additional capabilities helping the discovery and analysis of subtle structures in the 3D domain.

Objective: general description

• [x] 1) Proper visualization of astronomical data cubes: using data astronomical data formats, such as FITS, and astronomical world coordinates system (WCS);
• [x] 2) Quantification: visualization of the beam, interactive histograms, contours, statistics linked with the 2D/3D views, masking volumes with segmentations, flux density profiles, moment maps and position-velocity diagrams;
• [x] 3) Enabling interactive smoothing in all three dimensions;
• [x] 4) Interactive HI data modeling coupled to visualization;
• [x] 5) Skill to overlay observations at different wavelength and to plot catalogs info on data;
• [ ] 6) Interoperability with Topcat, and other virtual observatory (VO) tools and catalogs.

For more information regarding the project, its status and License, please check the following links:

• https://github.com/Punzo/SlicerAstro/wiki
• https://www.slicer.org/slicerWiki/index.php/Documentation/Nightly/Extensions/SlicerAstro