Seeing the sky through Hubble's eye: The COSMOS SkyWalker

Abstract

Large, high-resolution space-based imaging surveys produce a volume of data that is difficult to present to the public in a comprehensible way. While megapixel-sized images can still be printed out or downloaded via the World Wide Web, this is no longer feasible for images with 10^9 pixels (e.g., the Hubble Space Telescope Advanced Camera for Surveys [ACS] images of the Galaxy Evolution from Morphology and SEDs [GEMS] project) or even 10^10 pixels (for the ACS Cosmic Evolution Survey [COSMOS]). We present a Web-based utility called the COSMOS SkyWalker that allows viewing of the huge ACS image data set, even through slow Internet connections. Using standard HTML and JavaScript, the application successively loads only those portions of the image at a time that are currently being viewed on the screen. The user can move within the image by using the mouse or interacting with an overview image. Using an astrometrically registered image for the COSMOS SkyWalker allows the display of calibrated world coordinates for use in science. The SkyWalker "technique" can be applied to other data sets. This requires some customization, notably the slicing up of a data set into small (e.g., 256^2 pixel) subimages. An advantage of the SkyWalker is the use of standard Web browser components; thus, it requires no installation of any software and can therefore be viewed by anyone across many operating systems.