Software

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.

The discovery of the origin of nearby star formation would not have been possible without glue. It allowed the researchers to seamlessly integrate our models for the 3D structure of nearby molecular clouds with the 3D locations and motions of young star forming regions and the latest model of the Local Bubble.

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.

AAS WorldWide Telescope was used to visualize the Local Bubble and nearby star-forming regions in the context of a (cartoon model) of our Milky Way Galaxy.

"OpenSpace is open-source interactive data visualization software designed to visualize the entire known universe and portray our ongoing efforts to investigate the cosmos." It is available for download at https://www.openspaceproject.com.

This software allowed us to create some of the videos you see on the Interactives page.

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. Want to try it for yourself? Install the plugin here.

"PyVista is a helper library for the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) that takes a different approach on interfacing with VTK through NumPy and direct array access. This package provides a Pythonic, well-documented interface exposing VTK’s powerful visualization backend to facilitate rapid prototyping, analysis, and visual integration of spatially referenced datasets. This module can be used for scientific plotting for presentations and research papers as well as a supporting module for other mesh dependent Python modules." It is avalable for download at https://docs.pyvista.org.

This library allowed us to create some of the visuals you see on the Interactives page.