{"dataset":{"slug":"astroinformatics","title":"Astroinformatics & the Virtual Research Ecosystem","description":"The software, computing, and data practices of data-intensive astronomy — the research software (scientific Python, Astropy, SunPy, Jupyter, Astroquery, visualisation), the research computing (HPC, GPU, cloud, distributed, science platforms, containers), and the concepts (workflows, provenance, query languages, big-data astronomy, the virtual research environment).","version":"1.0.0","lastGenerated":"2026-06-29","license":"CC BY-SA 4.0","entityCount":28,"sources":["nasa","stsci","noirlab"]},"entities":[{"id":"research_software:aladin","name":"Aladin","type":"research_software","domain":"science","description":"An interactive sky-atlas application from the Strasbourg astronomical data centre that lets the user overlay images, surveys, and catalogues on the same patch of sky and query Virtual Observatory services directly. Aladin is a central tool for cross-identifying objects across archives.","entryPath":"/astronomy-software/aladin"},{"id":"research_software:astroimagej","name":"AstroImageJ","type":"research_software","domain":"science","description":"An astronomy-focused build of the ImageJ image-analysis program, adding precise astronomical image display, calibration, and differential photometry. AstroImageJ is especially popular for measuring exoplanet transit light curves from amateur and small-professional telescopes.","entryPath":"/astronomy-software/astroimagej"},{"id":"astroinformatics_concept:astronomical-query-languages","name":"Astronomical Query Languages","type":"astroinformatics_concept","domain":"science","description":"The Astronomical Data Query Language, a dialect of SQL extended with the geometry of the sky, lets astronomers ask precise questions of enormous catalogues — every source within a region, or every object matching a set of criteria. It is the language that the Virtual Observatory's Table Access Protocol serves.","entryPath":"/astroinformatics/astronomical-query-languages"},{"id":"research_software:astropy","name":"Astropy","type":"research_software","domain":"science","description":"The community-developed core package for astronomy in Python, providing the shared building blocks the field relies on: physical units and constants, celestial coordinate transformations, time scales, cosmological calculations, and reading and writing of FITS and other data formats. A large ecosystem of affiliated packages builds on its foundation.","entryPath":"/astroinformatics/astropy"},{"id":"research_software:astroquery","name":"Astroquery","type":"research_software","domain":"science","description":"An Astropy-affiliated package that lets researchers query the major astronomical archives and databases directly from code. Instead of clicking through web forms, a scientist can pull catalogues and images from MAST, VizieR, SIMBAD, and dozens of other services programmatically, making analyses scriptable and repeatable.","entryPath":"/astroinformatics/astroquery"},{"id":"astroinformatics_concept:big-data-astronomy","name":"Big-Data Astronomy","type":"astroinformatics_concept","domain":"science","description":"Modern surveys have turned astronomy into a data-intensive science. Gaia charts over a billion stars, the Rubin Observatory's LSST will image the whole southern sky every few nights, and the Square Kilometre Array will generate data faster than any prior instrument — forcing new ways to store, move, and analyse information at petabyte scale.","entryPath":"/astroinformatics/big-data-astronomy"},{"id":"research_software:casa","name":"CASA","type":"research_software","domain":"science","description":"The Common Astronomy Software Applications package, the primary tool for calibrating and imaging data from radio interferometers, developed for ALMA and the Very Large Array. CASA turns the raw visibilities of an interferometer into scientific images and cubes.","entryPath":"/astronomy-software/casa"},{"id":"research_computing:cloud-computing","name":"Cloud Computing","type":"research_computing","domain":"science","description":"Elastic, on-demand computing rented from remote data centres. Rather than moving petabytes of survey data to a researcher's own machine, cloud computing lets the analysis run next to the data, a shift that underpins the science platforms being built for the next generation of surveys.","entryPath":"/astroinformatics/cloud-computing"},{"id":"research_computing:containerisation","name":"Containerisation & Reproducible Environments","type":"research_computing","domain":"science","description":"Packaging software together with its exact dependencies into a portable container, so that an analysis runs identically on a laptop, a supercomputer, or the cloud. Containers have become a cornerstone of reproducible research, freezing the computational environment in which a result was produced.","entryPath":"/astroinformatics/containerisation"},{"id":"astroinformatics_concept:data-provenance","name":"Data Provenance","type":"astroinformatics_concept","domain":"science","description":"The recorded lineage of a data product: which raw observations, software versions, and processing steps produced it. Provenance lets a result be traced back to its origins and trusted or reproduced — distinct from a persistent identifier, which names the product, provenance describes how it came to be.","entryPath":"/astroinformatics/data-provenance"},{"id":"research_computing:distributed-computing","name":"Distributed Computing","type":"research_computing","domain":"science","description":"Spreading a computation across many loosely-coupled machines so that datasets far too large for one computer can be processed in parallel. Frameworks for distributed data processing let astronomers cross-match billion-row catalogues and reduce survey images across clusters of ordinary servers.","entryPath":"/astroinformatics/distributed-computing"},{"id":"research_computing:gpu-computing","name":"GPU Computing","type":"research_computing","domain":"science","description":"Graphics processing units, originally built for rendering, excel at the massively parallel arithmetic that powers modern simulation and machine learning. Astronomy uses them to accelerate everything from N-body dynamics and radiative transfer to the training of the large neural networks now applied to survey data.","entryPath":"/astroinformatics/gpu-computing"},{"id":"research_computing:high-performance-computing","name":"High-Performance Computing","type":"research_computing","domain":"science","description":"The supercomputers on which astronomers run the largest cosmological simulations and process survey data at scale. By dividing a problem across thousands of tightly-coupled processors, high-performance computing makes it possible to model the growth of cosmic structure or the collision of neutron stars from first principles.","entryPath":"/astroinformatics/high-performance-computing"},{"id":"research_software:iraf","name":"IRAF","type":"research_software","domain":"science","description":"The Image Reduction and Analysis Facility, a classic suite for the reduction and analysis of astronomical images and spectra developed at the US national optical observatory. Once ubiquitous in professional astronomy, it is no longer actively developed by the observatory but is maintained by the community, and much of its role has passed to the Python ecosystem.","entryPath":"/astronomy-software/iraf"},{"id":"research_software:jupyter-notebooks","name":"Jupyter Notebooks","type":"research_software","domain":"science","description":"Interactive documents that weave together live code, results, plots, and narrative text in one place. Notebooks have become the default medium for exploratory analysis, teaching, and sharing reproducible research in astronomy, and they sit at the heart of the cloud-based science platforms now serving the largest surveys.","entryPath":"/astroinformatics/jupyter-notebooks"},{"id":"research_software:montage","name":"Montage","type":"research_software","domain":"science","description":"A toolkit for assembling astronomical images into custom mosaics, reprojecting many overlapping FITS images onto a common grid and matching their backgrounds to make a seamless whole. Montage is used to build large image mosaics from survey data while preserving flux.","entryPath":"/astronomy-software/montage"},{"id":"research_software:orekit","name":"Orekit","type":"research_software","domain":"science","description":"A mature, low-level space-flight-dynamics library in Java (with Python bindings) providing high-precision orbit propagation, attitude modelling, time and frame transformations, and maneuver planning. Orekit is used in professional mission analysis and operations for its accuracy and breadth.","entryPath":"/astronomy-software/orekit"},{"id":"research_software:poliastro","name":"poliastro","type":"research_software","domain":"science","description":"A Python library for interactive astrodynamics and orbital mechanics — defining orbits, propagating them, and planning maneuvers — built on Astropy's units and time handling. Its active development is now archived, with the work continuing in a successor library, but it remains a well-known tool for orbit computations.","entryPath":"/astronomy-software/poliastro"},{"id":"astroinformatics_concept:research-software-engineering","name":"Research Software Engineering","type":"astroinformatics_concept","domain":"science","description":"The recognition that scientific software deserves the same care as any other research output: version control, testing, documentation, code review, and open licensing. As astronomy has grown more computational, sustaining and citing the software behind results has become a discipline in its own right.","entryPath":"/astroinformatics/research-software-engineering"},{"id":"research_software:ds9","name":"SAOImage DS9","type":"research_software","domain":"science","description":"A widely used astronomical imaging and data-visualisation application for displaying FITS images, with support for multiple frames, colour scales, region analysis, and coordinate overlays. DS9 is a standard viewer for inspecting professional image data.","entryPath":"/astronomy-software/ds9"},{"id":"research_computing:science-platforms","name":"Science Platforms","type":"research_computing","domain":"science","description":"Integrated, cloud-based environments that bring the analysis tools to the data. Platforms such as the Rubin Science Platform give researchers notebooks, catalogue databases, and image access alongside a survey's archive, so that discovery no longer requires downloading the data at all.","entryPath":"/astroinformatics/science-platforms"},{"id":"research_software:scientific-visualization","name":"Scientific Visualization","type":"research_software","domain":"science","description":"The tools and craft of turning data into images that reveal structure — from the ubiquitous Matplotlib plots to interactive and three-dimensional renderings of simulations and surveys. Visualisation is both how astronomers explore their data and how they communicate discoveries.","entryPath":"/astroinformatics/scientific-visualization"},{"id":"astroinformatics_concept:scientific-workflows","name":"Scientific Workflows","type":"astroinformatics_concept","domain":"science","description":"The orchestration of a multi-step analysis — each stage's inputs, outputs, and dependencies made explicit — so that a whole computation can be re-run automatically and at scale. Workflow systems turn a tangle of scripts into a repeatable pipeline, the backbone of processing survey data through many stages.","entryPath":"/astroinformatics/scientific-workflows"},{"id":"research_software:skyfield","name":"Skyfield","type":"research_software","domain":"science","description":"A Python library for computing precise positions of stars, planets, and satellites as seen from any point on the Earth or in space, using the same JPL ephemerides and reference frames as professional astronomy. Skyfield is a popular modern tool for accurate, easy positional astronomy.","entryPath":"/astronomy-software/skyfield"},{"id":"research_software:sunpy","name":"SunPy","type":"research_software","domain":"science","description":"The community package for solar physics in Python, the solar counterpart to Astropy. It provides the data structures, coordinate frames, and access to solar observatory archives that let researchers analyse images and time series of the Sun within the same open scientific-Python ecosystem.","entryPath":"/astroinformatics/sunpy"},{"id":"research_software:scientific-python-ecosystem","name":"The Scientific Python Ecosystem","type":"research_software","domain":"science","description":"The open-source foundation of modern astronomical computing: the Python language together with NumPy for array mathematics, SciPy for scientific algorithms, and pandas for tabular data. Free and community-built, it has become the common language in which most astronomical analysis is now written.","entryPath":"/astroinformatics/scientific-python-ecosystem"},{"id":"astroinformatics_concept:the-virtual-research-environment","name":"The Virtual Research Environment","type":"astroinformatics_concept","domain":"science","description":"The vision of an integrated, online ecosystem where data, software, and computing come together — the Virtual Observatory's interoperable archives joined to cloud science platforms and shared notebooks. In such an environment a researcher can find, access, and analyse data from many facilities without ever leaving the browser.","entryPath":"/astroinformatics/the-virtual-research-environment"},{"id":"research_software:topcat","name":"TOPCAT","type":"research_software","domain":"science","description":"An interactive desktop tool for viewing, cross-matching, plotting, and manipulating large astronomical tables and catalogues, with deep support for Virtual Observatory table formats and services. TOPCAT is a workhorse for exploring catalogue data from surveys and archives.","entryPath":"/astronomy-software/topcat"}]}