Interactive Visualization of Astronomy Images : Integrating AAS WorldWide Telescope into OpenSpace

Sammanfattning: This report describes a master thesis project developed by students from Linköping University. The project was conducted in collaboration with the American Museum of Natural History in New York City and is a contribution to the open-source software OpenSpace. The report presents the design and development of an interactive visualization of astronomy images taken by telescopes. The visualization was created by integrating the astronomy software AAS WorldWide Telescope into OpenSpace. The target audience was the general public as well as astronomy researchers and scientists. The visualization is implemented using two different views; one when the camera is inside the solar system and one for when it is outside the solar system. The view inside the solar system mimics a telescope that the user can aim with the help of a target. The target is rendered on the night sky in OpenSpace and the view from the virtual telescope is displayed in another window. Telescope images from AAS WorldWide Telescope can be loaded and displayed in both visualization views. The view outside of the solar system places the images on planes that are located at the 3D position of the objects in the images. The research topics for this work focused on the visualization of two-dimensional images in a three-dimensional environment while ensuring that their spatial context and their field of views could be understood. The result is an interactive visualization showing all images from the AAS WorldWide Telescope collection and the two different modes of visualization. User tests were conducted to evaluate the visualization. The result of the user tests showed that the visualization is generally easy to understand and encouraged exploration of the image collection.