Java Advanced Imaging In Action -- European Southern Observatory

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The European Southern Observatory (ESO) is an intergovernmental astronomical research organization based in Germany. The ESO's Data Management Division has created Skycat, an astronomical image display and catalog browsing tool used by many astronomers and at facilities around the world. ESO faces the challenge of image data files that tend to be 1GB or larger in size, too big to be stored in normal memory.

Skycat allows users to load images and astronomical catalog data from files or from image servers across the Internet. It supports drawing overlays on an image and plotting catalog data in various coordinate spaces, such as world or image coordinates. In addition, Skycat also provides developers with a library of classes for manipulating astronomical images and catalog data.

ESO chose the Java and Java Advanced Imaging technologies to develop JSky, the next generation Skycat tool, in order to minimize time spent on porting and machine/OS related issues. ESO chose these technologies for their added functionality and flexibility which allow the developers to concentrate on improving the application itself. The Java Advanced Imaging API provides an extensible framework for adding new imaging operations and formats; it is an easy to use template that can be customized with a company's algorithmic details.

In addition, the Java Advanced Imaging API includes "tiling" and remote viewing features which enables users to download a single section of an image at a time, reducing bandwidth requirements and allowing end-users to move quickly from image to image. This crucial feature allows JSky to handle ESO's image files quickly and easily.

" Many of the Java Advanced Imaging API features fit well into what we are doing. The JSky application relies on the image processing functions like lookup table, histogram, and transpose which are built into the Java Advanced Imaging API. It also relies on the tiling and remote viewing features of the Java Advanced Imaging API for dealing with large and/or remote image files. We appreciate the scalability of the API across resolutions and platforms and the speed at which the API performs tasks. JSky will be a much more flexible tool because of Java technology and the Java Advanced Imaging API. We expect that developers at other research institutions will use and contribute to this project, and we anticipate that the use of Java technology and the Java Advanced Imaging API will become a standard in the astronomical community. "

Miguel Albrecht
Head ESO/DMD Science Archive Group
European Southern Observatory

Please also see: "Exploring the Universe" about the Gemini North Observatory, GeoVirgil, a NASA planetary imagery map program, and The Scientist's Expert Assistant, a system to assist astronomers in planning observations.

ESO
DMD/Science Archive Facility
Karl-Schwarzschild-Str 2, D-85748
Garching bei Muenchen, Germany
+49 89 32006 346, phone
+49 89 32006 480, fax