Explore Interactive Planets with Aladin

The Aladin Sky Atlas suite enables users to visualise and manipulate digitised astronomical images or full surveys, superimpose entries from astronomical catalogues or databases, and interactively access related data and information from astronomical archives. Using the Hierarchical Progressive Surveys (HiPS) methodology, developed by the Strasbourg Astronomical Data Center (CDS) at the Universite de Strasbourg/CNRS, multiple Solar System bodies can be explored through the Aladin Lite planets explorer or  full list of available planetary maps on Aladin Desktop.

Earth can also be explored with Aladin. Thomas Boch recently created a new HiPS combining Earth elevation data with hillshading; with the pointer tool, you can even get OpenStreetMap information on local features.

Acknowledgements

• Earth elevation : Jonathan de Ferranti – GEBCO
• Hillshading map computed from EarthPy hillshade function, using the default values of azimuth=30 deg, altitude=30 deg.

CDS work toward enabling data access and visualisation of planetary surface data has been partly supported by the Europlanet 2024 RI project. Europlanet 2024 RI has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871149.