IVOA Recommendation: HiPS - Hierarchical Progressive Survey

TL;DR

HiPS is a hierarchical tiling scheme for sky survey data that enables efficient multi-resolution viewing and access, based on HEALPix tessellation, supporting progressive zooming and panning.

Contribution

This paper introduces HiPS, a novel hierarchical tiling scheme for sky surveys that improves data access and visualization through a simple, practical file structure.

Findings

Enables progressive multi-resolution viewing of sky surveys

Supports efficient data storage and access via hierarchical tiling

Based on HEALPix tessellation for uniform sky coverage

Abstract

This document presents HiPS, a hierarchical scheme for the description, storage and access of sky survey data. The system is based on hierarchical tiling of sky regions at finer and finer spatial resolution which facilitates a progressive view of a survey, and supports multi-resolution zooming and panning. HiPS uses the HEALPix tessellation of the sky as the basis for the scheme and is implemented as a simple file structure with a direct indexing scheme that leads to practical implementations.