FitsMap: A Simple, Lightweight Tool For Displaying Interactive Astronomical Image and Catalog Data

TL;DR

FitsMap is a lightweight, web-based tool that enables efficient visualization of large-scale astronomical images and catalogs, supporting mobile access and scalable performance.

Contribution

It introduces FitsMap, a simple, open-source visualization tool capable of handling gigapixel images with millions of sources using minimal setup.

Findings

Supports over gigapixel images with tens of millions of sources

Operates efficiently on mobile devices

Requires only a simple web server for deployment

Abstract

The visual inspection of image and catalog data continues to be a valuable aspect of astronomical data analysis. As the scale of astronomical image and catalog data continues to grow, visualizing the data becomes increasingly difficult. In this work, we introduce FitsMap, a simple, lightweight tool for visualizing astronomical image and catalog data. FitsMap only requires a simple web server and can scale to over gigapixel images with tens of millions of sources. Further, the web-based visualizations can be viewed performantly on mobile devices. FitsMap is implemented in Python and is open source (https://github.com/ryanhausen/fitsmap).