Fast interactive web-based data visualizer of panoramic spectroscopic surveys

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fast, web-based interactive visualization tool for panoramic spectroscopic survey data, enabling astronomers to explore large spectral datasets efficiently online.

Contribution

It presents a novel web service with connected views, REST API, and modern UI for visualizing and analyzing large spectral cubes from major astronomical surveys.

Findings

Supports spectral cube visualization from multiple surveys

Provides fast, responsive, and user-friendly interface

Enables exploration of derived parameter maps and modeling results

Abstract

Panoramic IFU spectroscopy is a core tool of modern observational astronomy and is especially important for galaxy physics. Many massive IFU surveys, such as SDSS MaNGA (10k targets), SAMI (3k targets), Califa (600 objects), Atlas3D (260 objects) have recently been released and made publicly available to the broad astronomical community. The complexity and massiveness of the derived data products from spectral cubes makes visualization of the entire dataset challenging, but nevertheless very important and crucial for scientific output. Based on our past experience with visualization of spectral and imaging data built in the frame of the VOxAstro Initiative projects, we are now developing online web service for interactive visualizing spectroscopic IFU datasets (ifu.voxastro.org). Our service will provide a convenient access and visualization tool for spectral cubes from publicly available surveys (MaNGA, SAMI, Califa, Atlas3D) and results of their modeling, as well as maps of parameters derived from cubes, implementing the connected views concept. Here we describe the core components and functionality of the service, including REST API implementation on top of the Django+Postgres backend as well as a fast and responsive user interface built using the modern Vue.js-based framework Quasar.