The visual exploration tools built for the SkyServer
make it easy to visualize and explore detailed astronomical data
in regions of the sky covered by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.
One can specify regions of interest by central position and
size. An underlying web service then combines the relevant images to
form a JPEG mosaic at the requested wide range of resolutions.
One can overlay additional useful information, including:
- boundaries of survey fields and aperture plates,
- outlines of individual objects and data quality masks, and
- locations of photometric and spectroscopic objects.
The tools can also search for lists of known objects, provide links for
detailed information, and formulate new database queries.
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- Finding Chart
The page returns a JPEG image centered on (ra,dec), of size (height x width)
where the image is scaled to an arbitrary scale (scale).
Various drawing options can be specified (opt).
- Navigate
This page provides easy navigation in the vicinity of a given point
on the sky. One can move around by clicking on the frame of the image,
or on individual objects. A short list of the basic properties and
a magnified thumbnail image of the object nearest to the selected
point is then displayed.
- Image List
This page can generate thumbnails of SDSS images based upon a
user defined list of object positions. The images are linked to the
other tools. The list can also be specified with a query.
- Explore
The Explore Tool contains a summary of an object, and interactive
links to further detailed properties, like its spectrum or neighbors, etc.
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