Software
On this page: glue, WorldWide Telescope, plot.ly, brutus – scroll down to see it all.
glue
glue is a Python library to explore relationships within and between related datasets. glue is publicly available for download at glueviz.org.
Linked Visualizations: With glue, users can create scatter plots, histograms and images (2D and 3D) of their data. glue is focused on the brushing and linking paradigm, where selections in any graph propagate to all others.
Flexible linking across data: glue uses the logical links that exist between different data sets to overlay visualizations of different data, and to propagate selections across data sets. These links are specified by the user, and are arbitrarily flexible
Full scripting capability: glue is written in Python, and built on top of its standard scientific libraries (i.e., Numpy, Matplotlib, Scipy). Users can easily integrate their own python code for data input, cleaning, and analysis.
Interested in a customized glue solution for your company? glue solutions inc. was founded by a subset of the Radcliffe Wave authors in 2019 to facilitate tailored visualization approaches for businesses. Customized commercial instances are available through http://gluesolutions.io
The discovery of the Waving Radcliffe Wave would not have been possible without glue. It allowed the Wave researchers to seamlessly integrate our new 3D distance data on stellar nurseries, together with the wealth of 6D stellar cluster data and ancillary 3D data on our Milky Way Galaxy, including existing spiral arm models.
AAS Worldwide Telescope
AAS WorldWide Telescope (WWT)* is an open-source set of applications, data and cloud services, originally created by Microsoft Research but now an open source project hosted on GitHub.[5] The .NET Foundation holds the copyright and the project is managed by the American Astronomical Society and has been supported by grants from the Moore Foundation and National Science Foundation. WWT displays astronomical, earth and planetary data allowing visual navigation through the 3-dimensional (3D) Universe. Users are able to navigate the sky by panning and zooming, or explore the 3D universe from the surface of Earth to past the Cosmic microwave background(CMB), viewing both visual imagery and scientific data (academic papers, etc.) about that area and the objects in it. Data is curated from hundreds of different data sources, but its open data nature allows users to explore any third party data that conforms to a WWT supported format. With the rich source of multi-spectral all-sky images it is possible to view the sky in many wavelengths of light.
*description from Wikipedia
AAS WorldWide Telescope was used to visualize the Radcliffe Wave in the context of a (cartoon model) of our Milky Way Galaxy. Check out our WorldWide Telescope tour to visualize the Wave for yourself!
Plotly
The plotly python graphing library is an interactive, open source, and browser-based software application for the creation of publication-quality graphs. It supports over thirty native plot types, which can be rendered in Jupyter notebookes, or as standalone HTML files. It is available for download at https://plot.ly/python/
plot.ly has been integrated into the glue visualization software via its custom plugin functionality. It is now possible to export 3D (and 2D!) scatter plots directly from glue into plot.ly, as a standalone "offline" html file renderable in your browser. This plugin allowed us to create some of the visuals you see on the Interactives page, which are embedded in the Nature article! Want to try it for yourself? Install the plugin here.
brutus
Want to calculate the distances to stars and clouds yourself? Check out the publicly available brutus python package on GitHub! Documentation coming soon!