ESASky v.2.0: all the skies in your browser

TL;DR

ESASky v.2.0 is an enhanced web portal providing comprehensive, science-ready astronomical data, improved usability, and new features for planning observations and accessing large datasets, aimed at scientists and the public.

Contribution

This paper introduces ESASky v.2.0, a significantly upgraded version with new data access, usability improvements, and features for planning JWST observations and exploring Solar System objects.

Findings

Access to all science-ready images, catalogues, spectra

Support for mobile devices and usability features

Lessons learned from over a year of operation

Abstract

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.