Aladin Lite

Overview

astro.aladin adds an interactive sky view for the currently focused record. It is useful for checking the surrounding field, nearby objects, and sky context without leaving the AstronomicAL workspace.

The panel embeds the Aladin Lite web application, allowing images from a wide range of astronomical surveys to be visualised interactively.

A predefined selection of surveys covering different wavelength ranges is provided. Additional surveys from the HiPS catalogue can be added by including their identifiers in SURVEY_DATA within the plugin’s panel.py.

What You Do

  1. Open the Aladin Lite panel.

  2. Map the record ID, right ascension, and declination columns if you have not already done so.

  3. Focus a record from a plot, the navigation bar, a gallery, or Record Browser.

  4. Use the controls in the embedded Aladin viewer to inspect the surrounding sky.

  5. Focus another record and the viewer recentres on the new source automatically.

The panel does not choose or own the current record. It follows the same platform focus used by other linked panels.

Required Mappings

The panel requires:

  • record_id

  • coords.ra

  • coords.dec

The coordinate values must contain valid sky coordinates for the viewer to move to the source.

Panel

Aladin Lite

The panel embeds Aladin Lite and centres it on the mapped coordinates of the focused record. Normal Aladin interactions remain available inside the viewer, while AstronomicAL handles the link between dataset focus and sky position.

The panel publishes astro.aladin.updated when its displayed source is updated. This can be useful for diagnostics or for plugins that need to react to changes in the sky viewer.

Saved State

Supported viewer settings and the panel layout are restored on a best-effort basis.

The focused record remains platform state and is not stored as an independent Aladin selection.

Troubleshooting

If the viewer does not move:

  • confirm that a record is focused;

  • check the coords.ra and coords.dec mappings;

  • inspect the focused record for missing or invalid coordinates;

  • confirm that the browser can load the Aladin web resources.

Note

Aladin provides a sky view around a source. It does not add catalogue measurements to the active dataset or automatically save viewed survey data.