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Interactive (statistical) visualisation and exploration of a billion objects with vaex

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 May 2017

M. A. Breddels
M. A. Breddels*
Affiliation:
Kapteyn Astronomical Institute, University of Groningen, P.O. Box 800, 9700 AV Groningen, The Netherlands email: [email protected]
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Abstract

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With new catalogues arriving such as the Gaia DR1, containing more than a billion objects, new methods of handling and visualizing these data volumes are needed. We show that by calculating statistics on a regular (N-dimensional) grid, visualizations of a billion objects can be done within a second on a modern desktop computer. This is achieved using memory mapping of hdf5 files together with a simple binning algorithm, which are part of a Python library called vaex. This enables efficient exploration or large datasets interactively, making science exploration of large catalogues feasible. Vaex is a Python library and an application, which allows for interactive exploration and visualization. The motivation for developing vaex is the catalogue of the Gaia satellite, however, vaex can also be used on SPH or N-body simulations, any other (future) catalogues such as SDSS, Pan-STARRS, LSST, etc. or other tabular data. The homepage for vaex is http://vaex.astro.rug.nl.

Type
Contributed Papers
Information
Proceedings of the International Astronomical Union , Volume 12 , Symposium S325: Astroinformatics , October 2016 , pp. 299 - 304
Copyright
Copyright © International Astronomical Union 2017 

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