ALMA Science Archive remote visualization with CARTA

Published: 12 Mar 2021
CARTA

The Cube Analysis and Rendering Tool for Astronomy (CARTA), a new image visualization and analysis tool designed for ALMA, VLA, and SKA pathfinders, has been integrated into the ALMA Science Archive (ASA). Now all 500,000+ science FITS files in the ALMA archive can be previewed using CARTA (Cycle 0 excluded).

After selecting one or more projects on the Archive Query Interface and navigating to the ALMA Request Handler page, one can expand a data product folder and look for the CARTA logo under the Actions column associated with each FITS image. After clicking on it, CARTA will automatically open in a new web browser tab and display the image (ASA needs to be allowed to open pop-ups in the web browser first).

CARTA utilizes client-server architecture, parallelization, GPU-accelerated rendering, and various latency-hiding techniques. The user interacts through the client interface running natively in their local web browser. Large images (TB-size ready) hosted from a remote server can be visualized within seconds. This makes it the ideal software to integrate with the ASA.

CARTA, originally an ALMA development project from 2014 to 2016, is now jointly developed by teams at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA) in Taiwan, the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA) in South Africa, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in the United States, and the Department of Physics, University of Alberta in Canada.

For more information, please visit the CARTA homepage. Try the Desktop version of CARTA on your local computer, or ask your system administrator to set up an institute-wide shared server version of CARTA. If you have any comments, suggestions or questions, please contact the CARTA Helpdesk.