The AstroStat Slog

Astronomy is known for its pretty pictures, but as Joe the Astronomer would say, those pretty pictures don’t make themselves. A lot of thought goes into maximizing scientific content while conveying just the right information, all discernible at a single glance. So the hardworkin folks at Chandra want your help in figuring out what works and how well, and they have set up a survey at http://astroart.cfa.harvard.edu/. Take the survey, it is both interesting and challenging!

All of a sudden, partially owing to a thought provoking talk about visualization by Felice Frankel at IIC, I recollected a book, The Grammar of Graphics by Leland Wilkinson (2nd Ed. - I partially read the 1st ed. and felt little of use several years ago because there seemed no link for visualization of data from astronomy.) Continue reading ‘[Book] The Grammar of Graphics’ »

From arxiv/astro-ph:0707.2474,
Visualization, Exploration and Data Analysis of Complex Astrophysical Data by Comparato, Becciani, Costa, Larsson, Garilli, Gheller, and Taylor

This paper introduces a novel advanced visualization tool VisIVO,^[1] its advantages from combining a protocol called PLASTIC (Platform for Astronomy Tool Interconnection) for displaying and extracting information from astrophysical data, its enhanced connection to VO (Virtual Observatory), and its usage in several scientific cases. Continue reading ‘[ArXiv] Data Visualization, July 17, 2007’ »

1. Available at http://visivo.cineca.it[↩]