The aXe Spectral Extraction and visualization software is designed to process large format astronomical slitless spectroscopic images such as those obtained with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). aXe is distributed as a subpackage for IRAF (Image Reduction and Analysis Facility - a general purpose software system for the reduction and analysis of astronomical data). The various aXe task can be executed within PyRAF, a command language that runs IRAF tasks and is based on the Python programming language.
The aXe package consists of several tasks, each of which performs a specific reduction step on the data to produce the final, extracted spectra. aXe is semiautomatic reduction system. After preparing all necessary input, the spectral reduction is done automatically. The user can then analyse and control the spectra and, if necessary, re-run aXe with slightly changed parameters until a satisfactory result is achieved.
A deep ACS WFC grism image can contain detectable spectra of several thousands objects. Checking each individual spectrum is very tedious. To help users analyzing the full wealth of their data, the additional aXe task aXe2web was developed. This tool produces browsable web pages from reduced spectral data to enable many hundreds of spectra to be examined quickly and discerningly. This tool can be used for a quick look or as preview facilities in data pipelines, databases or even for virtual observatories.
Usability can be described as the capacity of a system to provide a condition for its users to perform the tasks safely, effectively, and efficiently while enjoying the experience. In software engineering, usability is the degree to which a software can be used by specified consumers to achieve quantified objectives with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a quantified context of use.
In computing, an icon is a pictogram or ideogram displayed on a computer screen in order to help the user navigate a computer system. The icon itself is a quickly comprehensible symbol of a software tool, function, or a data file, accessible on the system and is more like a traffic sign than a detailed illustration of the actual entity it represents. It can serve as an electronic hyperlink or file shortcut to access the program or data. The user can activate an icon using a mouse, pointer, finger, or voice commands. Their placement on the screen, also in relation to other icons, may provide further information to the user about their usage. In activating an icon, the user can move directly into and out of the identified function without knowing anything further about the location or requirements of the file or code.
IRAF is a collection of software written at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) geared towards the reduction of astronomical images and spectra in pixel array form. This is primarily data taken from imaging array detectors such as CCDs. It is available for all major operating systems for mainframes and desktop computers. IRAF was designed cross-platform, supporting VMS and UNIX-like operating systems. Use on Microsoft Windows was made possible by Cygwin in earlier versions, and can be today done with the Windows Subsystem for Linux. Today, it is primarily used on macOS and Linux.
In systems engineering and software engineering, requirements analysis focuses on the tasks that determine the needs or conditions to meet the new or altered product or project, taking account of the possibly conflicting requirements of the various stakeholders, analyzing, documenting, validating and managing software or system requirements.
Software prototyping is the activity of creating prototypes of software applications, i.e., incomplete versions of the software program being developed. It is an activity that can occur in software development and is comparable to prototyping as known from other fields, such as mechanical engineering or manufacturing.
A web content management system is a software content management system (CMS) specifically for web content. It provides website authoring, collaboration, and administration tools that help users with little knowledge of web programming languages or markup languages create and manage website content. A WCMS provides the foundation for collaboration, providing users the ability to manage documents and output for multiple author editing and participation. Most systems use a content repository or a database to store page content, metadata, and other information assets the system needs.
The Space Telescope – European Coordinating Facility (ST-ECF) was an institution which provided a number of support and service functions primarily for European observers of the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope (HST). It was established in 1984 by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Southern Observatory (ESO), and was located at the ESO headquarters in Garching bei München, Germany. The ST-ECF ceased operations on 31 December 2010.
IGOR Pro is a scientific data analysis software, numerical computing environment and programming language that runs on Windows or Mac operating systems. It is developed by WaveMetrics Inc., and was originally aimed at time series analysis, but has since then evolved and covers other applications such as curve fitting and image processing. It comes with a fully functional programming language and compiler, but many functions are also accessible through menus. IGOR Pro is primarily known for its graphics capabilities, and like Origin and other similar programs, is often used to generate plots for scientific and other publications. Other features include the possibility of extending the built-in functions with external operations (XOP) allowing data acquisition, manipulation and analysis features, communication with external devices and in principle any other task that can be programmed in C or C++.
The Starlink Project, referred to by users as Starlink and by developers as simply The Project, was a UK astronomical computing project which supplied general-purpose data reduction software. Until the late 1990s, it also supplied computing hardware and system administration personnel to UK astronomical institutes. In the former respect, it was analogous to the US IRAF project.
Software project management is the process of planning and leading software projects. It is a sub-discipline of project management in which software projects are planned, implemented, monitored and controlled.
The Space Telescope Science Data Analysis System (STSDAS) is an IRAF-based suite of astronomical software for reducing and analyzing astronomical data. It contains general purpose tools and packages for processing data from the Hubble Space Telescope. STSDAS is produced by Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI). The STSDAS software is in the public domain and the source code is available.
The International Virtual Observatory Alliance (IVOA) is a worldwide scientific organisation formed in June 2002. Its mission is to facilitate international coordination and collaboration necessary for enabling global and integrated access to data gathered by astronomical observatories. An information system allowing such an access is called a virtual observatory. The main task of the organisation so far has focused on defining standards to ensure interoperability of the different virtual observatory projects already existing or in development.
Astronomical Image Processing System++ is a software package whose development was started in the early nineties, written almost entirely in C++, and which initial goal was to replace the by then already aging AIPS software. It has now been reborn as CASA and is the basis of the image processing systems for several next-generation radio telescopes including ALMA, eVLA, and ASKAP.
The Astronomical Image Processing System (AIPS) is a software package to support the reduction and analysis of data taken with radio telescopes. Developed predominantly for use with the then under-construction VLA, the generality inherent in its design allowed it to become the standard data-reduction package for most radio interferometers, including VLBI. Limited single-dish capability is also featured. Although partially replaced by CASA, it continues to evolve and remains in use.
Opticks is a remote sensing application that supports imagery, video, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), multi-spectral, hyper-spectral, and other types of remote sensing data. Opticks supports processing remote sensing video in the same manner as it supports imagery, which differentiates it from other remote sensing applications. Opticks was initially developed by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. and other organizations for the United States Intelligence Community. Ball Aerospace open sourced Opticks hoping to increase the demand for remote sensing data and broaden the features available in existing remote sensing software. The Opticks software and its extensions are developed by over twenty different organizations, and over two hundred users are registered users at http://opticks.org. Future planned enhancements include adding the ability to ingest and visualize lidar data, as well as a three-dimensional (3-D) visualization capability.
WorldWide Telescope (WWT) is an open-source set of applications, data and cloud services, originally created by Microsoft Research but now an open source project hosted on GitHub. The .NET Foundation holds the copyright and the project is managed by the American Astronomical Society and has been supported by grants from the Moore Foundation and National Science Foundation. WWT displays astronomical, earth and planetary data allowing visual navigation through the 3-dimensional (3D) Universe. Users are able to navigate the sky by panning and zooming, or explore the 3D universe from the surface of Earth to past the Cosmic microwave background (CMB), viewing both visual imagery and scientific data about that area and the objects in it. Data is curated from hundreds of different data sources, but its open data nature allows users to explore any third party data that conforms to a WWT supported format. With the rich source of multi-spectral all-sky images it is possible to view the sky in many wavelengths of light. The software utilizes Microsoft's Visual Experience Engine technologies to function. WWT can also be used to visualize arbitrary or abstract data sets and time series data.
The NASA Exoplanet Archive is an online astronomical exoplanet catalog and data service that collects and serves public data that support the search for and characterization of extra-solar planets (exoplanets) and their host stars. It is part of the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center and is on the campus of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, CA. The archive is funded by NASA and was launched in early December 2011 by the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute as part of NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program. In June 2019, the archive's collection of confirmed exoplanets surpassed 4,000.
Astropy is a collection of software packages written in the Python programming language and designed for use in astronomy. The software is a single, free, core package for astronomical utilities due to the increasingly widespread usage of Python by astronomers, and to foster interoperability between various extant Python astronomy packages. Astropy is included in several large Python distributions; it is part of package managers for Linux and macOS, the Anaconda Python Distribution, Enthought Canopy and Ureka.
The Open Source application Bio7 is a software for ecological simulation models, image analysis and statistical analysis. Built upon the RCP framework of Eclipse it embeds several tools and programming languages for the analysis of complex ecological systems. Several Java based scripting languages and the Java language can be used from within Bio7 for the creation of simulation models and analysis tasks. In addition, Bio7 also contains a complete Graphical User Interface for the statistical R programming language and the scientific image analysis tool ImageJ with special functions to send image data from ImageJ to R or R data to ImageJ.
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