In this post, I would like to introduce you to two very powerful browser-based astronomical applications - ESASky and the WorldWide Telescope Web clients. Personally, I love the peaceful serenity that is found by using astronomical software to calm the troubled mind. These two applications are linked together and can be used jointly during the boring parts of online meetings. For example, in my last IT job, I spent 13 years in the Middleware Ops IT department of the Discover credit card company. In the middle of the night, during large installs or outage conference calls, there were long stretches of dead time when I would have to patiently stand by as other groups did their work. In order to not fall asleep, I found it quite useful to go on extended tours of our Universe. My hope is that you will be able to do so as well during any boring online meetings you might be obliged to attend.
Basically, there are two kinds of astronomical software. Astronomical simulation software lets you go to places in the Universe that you will never be able to actually see or experience and in times that are well outside of your brief stay in this Universe, as I pointed out in SpaceEngine - the Very Finest Available in 3-D Astronomical Simulation Software. Observational astronomical software, on the other hand, lets you easily explore what has actually already been discovered by our telescopes and planetary probes, as I described in The Spectacular and Free Software of the WorldWide Telescope - WWT. I find both to be quite awe-inspiring and uplifting. The only problem with most astronomical software is that if you run it locally on your own machine, it requires you to download and install a huge amount of software and data. It also requires that you have a substantial machine with a good deal of memory and a decent graphics card too. But there is a solution to this problem with today's advanced Cloud-based software. For example, I had had a company-provided 80-286 PC since 1987, but in 1991, I finally bought my very own PC for the very first time. It was an 80-386 IBM clone with 5 MB of memory and a 100 MB disk drive for $1500 in 1991 dollars! The store clerk that I bought it from wondered why I needed such a powerful machine. Was I planning to run a business with it?
As you can imagine, deploying many thousands of such very expensive machines to the desks of all the employees in a large corporation during the late 1980s and early 1990s presented quite a sticker shock for Corporate Management. There had to be a cheaper way. So to overcome this problem, businesses soon adopted a new client/server architecture with the Distributed Computing Architecture. At first, it was a two-tier client/server architecture where servers did most of the work and then sent back the results to cheap client PCs on the desks of corporate employees. Then it advanced to a three-tier client/server architecture that inserted many layers of servers into the "back end" processing of data.
Figure 1 – Beginning in the early 1990s, the Distributed Computing Revolution allowed a client/server architecture to empower users with PCs of very limited ability to perform complex business operations using the vast powers of servers in the background. Click to enlarge.
But in the past decade, much of the Distributed Computing Architecture has been migrated to the Cloud using advanced Cloud-Based software. For more on that see my 2016 post Cloud Computing and the Coming Software Mass Extinction.
Figure 2 – During the last decade, Cloud Computing returned us to the timesharing days of the 1960s and 1970s by viewing everything as a service. The ESASky and the WorldWide Telescope Web clients are examples of SaaS - Software as a Service where all of the real work is done by the Cloud and the client software on the user's machine only displays results.
Using Your Browser To Do High-Powered Astronomy
So limping along with very underpowered hardware is nothing new to me. In fact, I have been doing so for more than 50 years. My current PC only has 4 GB of memory and a 500 GB HDD disk drive. Now, I certainly could afford to upgrade this machine or replace it with a more modern powerful machine, but the thought of configuring a new machine with all the software that I currently use is just too much for me, given that I am just fine for now with what I have if I only use the hardware just a little bit wisely. I always have the Windows Task Manager running so that I can check all of the currently running processes for CPU, Memory and Disk usage. You see, for me, it is still all just magic that I still have a hard time believing actually exists, given the primitive vacuum-tube world of my youth. So in this post, I would like to describe how you can use two browser-based applications, the ESASky and the WorldWide Telescope Web clients, to do some amazing astronomical feats without the need for high-end hardware or software.
ESASky was developed at ESAC, the European Space Astronomy Center, Madrid, Spain, by the ESAC Science Data Centre (ESDC).
ESAC is the European Space Agency's (ESA) main establishment for space science. It is located in Villanueva de la Cañada, near Madrid, Spain. ESAC hosts the science operation centers for all ESA astronomy and planetary missions together with their scientific archives. For the purposes of this tutorial you should start up ESASky with:
ESASky
https://sky.esa.int/esasky/?target=83.81258981950579%20-5.398102548996337&hips=2MASS+color+JHK&fov=0.23602282354313556&cooframe=J2000&sci=false&lang=en&jwst_image=webb_orionnebula_shortwave
to have ESASky start up in the Orion Nebula. To have ESASky start up looking at a random point in the sky use:
ESASky
https://sky.esa.int/esasky/
ESASky documentation is available at:
https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/esdc/esasky-help
The WorldWide Telescope is sponsored by NumFOCUS, a nonprofit dedicated to supporting the open-source scientific computing community. Work on the WWT has been supported by the American Astronomical Society (AAS), the National Science Foundation and others. To get to the WorldWide Telescope Web client go to:
WorldWide Telescope Web client
http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/webclient/
WorldWide Telescope Documentation
https://docs.worldwidetelescope.org/user-manual/1/
I will be using the Chrome browser for the rest of this post. Before using these web-based Applications, it is important to be able to run them in Full Screen mode on Chrome. To do that, click on the three vertical dots in the upper right corner of Chrome to open the Chrome Menu on the right of your screen. Then click on the Full Screen icon to the right of Zoom. If any of the following images are too small for you to read just click on them to see them enlarged.
Figure 3 – Click on the three vertical dots in the upper right of your Chrome webpage to open the Chrome menu on the right. Then click on the Full Screen icon to the right of Zoom.
Figure 4 – To leave Full Screen, right-click on your screen to open an options popup and then click on Exit full screen.
Now go back to the link for the ESASKy Application above to open the Application. Then set Chrome to Full Screen. What you will see is the Orion Nebula in the background with lots of informational textboxes on top of it. The Orion Nebula is a very bright and close molecular cloud that is about 1350 light years from the Earth. Molecular clouds are large bodies of gas and dust in our Milky Way galaxy that are in the process of collapsing into new stars and solar systems of planets. Molecular clouds contain large amounts of gaseous molecules, including the organic molecules that you and I are made of. As little clumps of gas and dust in these molecular clouds collapse under their own weight, they heat up because gravitational potential energy is converted into heat energy like the descending weights in an old-time grandfather's clock. However, the vibrating molecules in the heated gas are able to emit electromagnetic radiation to carry away the collapse energy. This allows small clumps of gas and dust within a molecular cloud to finally collapse into a star. Because the large clumps of gas and dust will necessarily be slowly rotating in a random manner, they also have to conserve angular momentum by spinning faster as they collapse, like a figure skater speeding up in a spin by pulling her arms in. One way to do that is to dump the angular momentum into a proto-planetary disk spinning around the protostar that is forming. Many such proto-planetary disks about newly forming stars can be seen in the Orion Nebula.
Figure 5 – Now open the ESASky Application.
ESASky will first ask if you want to use the Application as an Explorer or a Scientist. For our purposes, you want to be an Explorer. In Science mode, ESASky is actually a visual repository for all the scientific information we currently have for whatever you happen to be looking at. In the Science mode, you can have ESASky pull up all of the scientific datasets in its archive for the region in view for download to your personal machine. It will also list all of the scientific astronomical papers that have been written for the region of the night sky that you are viewing in your browser too.
Figure 6 – If you remove all of the textboxes by clicking on their "-"s, you will see the Orion Nebula more clearly. Notice that we are now using the Near-Infrared band in the "Select Sky" box and that the "Select Sky" button has been activated in the upper left of your screen.
Figure 7 – Now add many new rows to the Select Sky box by clicking on the "+" and "Add new row" items.
Now let's turn on many more Sky Surveys to cover a larger part of the electromagnetic spectrum. In fact, I will turn on 11 Sky Surveys to cover the entire electromagnetic spectrum from Gamma-rays to Radio waves. To do that, click the "+" sign and "Add new row" in the Select Sky box 10 times and then edit each entry to step through the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Each band in the spectrum will offer a number of sky surveys to choose from. For example, for the Optical band, I chose two surveys, the "DSS2 color" and the "DSS2 red" surveys. That is because the "DSS2 red" survey features the DSS2 survey just through a red filter and is therefore closer to the Near Infrared band in the electromagnetic spectrum. For the other bands, I just went with the default survey for each band.
Figure 8 – Now I have 11 bands in the electromagnetic spectrum to choose from. Above we see that I have Zoomed out from the Orion Nebula and switched from the Near-Infrared band to the Optical band using the "DSS2 color" survey.
Figure 9 – Then I clicked the Forward button at the bottom of the Select Sky box two times to skip from the "DSS2 color" survey in the Optical band to the Near-Infrared band. If you press the Play button at the bottom of the Select Sky box, you can have ESASky cycle through all of the listed bands. It will slowly morph one survey into the next as it cycles. You can even exit out of the Select Sky box using its "-" icon and let the movie continue on. These 11 bands in the Select Sky box will stay in effect as long as you have your ESASky session running in the Chrome tab. That means you can go to other locations in the night sky and cycle through the 11 sky surveys as desired.
Now let's look for some closeups of this area in the sky from the Hubble Telescope and the new James Webb Telescope too. To do that, click on the Hubble button to the right of the Select Sky button on the top left of your screen. The Hubble button is the 4th button and the James Webb button is the 5th button.
Figure 10 – Above we see the available Hubble closeup images. It turns out that 25 Hubble closeups are available in our current field of view and 2140 Hubble images are for other parts of the sky. Notice that I have the Hide Footprints option enabled in the popup box. That will turn off the green boxes displayed in the field. The green boxes tell you where Hubble closeup images exist. The green boxes are useful when you are zoomed way out and are looking for places with Hubble closeup images to zoom in on. However, once you have selected a Hubble closeup they just are a nuisance. For the James Webb Telescope, the boxes are orange-colored and can be used or turned off in a similar manner.
Now we can look to see what closeups are available from the James Webb Telescope for this field of view by clicking on the fifth button.
Figure 11 – Above are the available James Webb closeups.
Figure 12 – Above, I selected one of the James Webb Telescope closeups for "The Orion Bar region (NIRcam image)".
Now click on the third button in the upper left that displays a scroll. This is the Target List button. On the far right you will now see a Target List popup box. From this popup box, you can choose an already existing list of Targets or you can upload your own list of Targets too. More on that later. Now click on the "Select Target List" button and then the "Star formation regions" entry in the dropdown.
Figure 13 – Click on the "Select Target List" button and then the "Star formation regions" entry in the dropdown.
Figure 14 – Click on the "Select Target List" button and then the "Star formation regions" entry in the dropdown.
This will present a List of molecular cloud Targets.
Figure 15 – Above, I chose the Eagle Nebula molecular cloud and ESASky then took me there and explained what I was looking at.
Figure 16 – Above, I switched from the "DSS2 Color" survey in the Optical band to a survey in the Mid-Infrared band.
Figure 17 – Above, I used the Hubble button to find Hubble closeups in the Eagle Nebula. I chose the famous "Pillars of Creation" closeup. Behind this Hubble closeup is the Eagle Nebula now in the Near-Infrared band. You can use the Image Opacity slider to fade out or fade in the Hubble closeup if desired.
To make your own Target List create a .txt file with the following format:
Object@desc@Description
You can use Bard to help with this tedious task. For example, I used the following Bard prompt:
List the first 100 entries in the NGC astronomical catalog. List each NGC number on a new line followed by "@desc" followed by a description of the object. The format should be like "NGC 300 @desc@NGC 300 is a spiral galaxy approximately 6 million light-years away in the constellation Sculptor."
I then copied/pasted the Bard output to a Bard.txt file and then told ESASky to upload the file as my own Target List to be displayed.
Figure 18 – I used the above Bard prompt to generate a Target List.
Figure 19 – Then I copied/pasted the Bard output into a Bard.txt file.
Figure 20 – Above, I see ESASky working on my Target List. Notice that my description is displayed in an information box by ESASky.
Figure 21 – Above, I used the Search bubble in the upper right of ESASky to look for the globular cluster M13. Once I got to M13, I pressed my right mouse button to pull up another popup box. In the far right of that popup box is a blue icon for "View in WorldWide Telescope". When I clicked on that icon, ESASky opened the WorldWide Telescope Web client in another Chrome tab and took me to the WorldWide Telescope Web client. It also placed me looking at the globular cluster M13.
Figure 22 – Now we are looking at M13 in the WorldWide Telescope Web client running in another Chrome tab. Notice that the user interface for the WorldWide Telescope Web client covers up most of the window. It has thick bands at the top, bottom and on the left that get in the way of viewing. To get rid of them make sure to check the "Auto Hide Tabs" and the "Auto Hide Content" checkboxes under the Settings menu. Then you will only see those portions of the user interface when your mouse pointer enters those regions in the viewing window.
Figure 23 – With the Tabs and Content now hidden, we can see globular cluster M13 with an unobstructed view.
Figure 24 – Next, I zoomed out from M13 with my mouse wheel and then moved my mouse pointer to the bottom of the window. That woke up the bottom Tab of the WorldWide Telescope Web and I can then see what other items of interest are in my field of view. The bottom Tab tells me that there are 89 interesting items in my field of view. To look through all of them it is a good idea to uncheck the "Auto Hide Tabs" temporarily so that the Tab does not fade away. The bottom Tab is also telling me that I am using the Digitized Sky Survey (Color) which is called the DSS2 Color survey in ESASky.
Figure 25 – If you need to work with the WorldWide Telescope Tabs for an extended period of time, it is a good idea to uncheck the "Auto Hide Tabs" checkbox.
Figure 26 – Above, I used the bottom Tab to switch from the Digitized Sky Survey (Color) to the Deep Star Maps 2020 survey.
Figure 27 – Next, I moved to a dense part of our Milky Way galaxy in the constellation Cygnus and switched to the Gaia DR2 survey.
The WorldWide Telescope Web client can do much more. For example, under the Explore menu, you will find many very interesting Collections of images to explore. Under the Guided Tours menu, you will find many interesting and informative lectures about our Universe that are conducted by using the WorldWide Telescope Web client software. Check the online documentation listed above for more details. You can also download a thin WorldWide Telescope client program from their main website:
WorldWide Telescope
http://www.worldwidetelescope.org/home/
The WorldWide Telescope client Application runs on your Windows machine outside of your Chrome browser. It has more functionality than the version that runs under Chrome and it does not use up lots of memory or require a powerful graphics card. It runs in 500 - 1,000 MB of free memory and runs just fine on my anemic graphics card.
Figure 28 – Finally, if you use the Chrome Memory Saver for inactive tabs, be sure to exempt ESASky and WorldWide Telescope Web. To do that, open the Chrome menu again and click on Settings. Then go to Performance. Have ESASky and WorldWide Telescope Web running at the time and check each checkbox for them. This will prevent any of their current settings from being lost. For example, the Select Sky surveys in ESASky can be lost by the Chrome Memory Saver.
How to Navigate Through Tabs When Chrome is in Full Screen Mode
Next, let me walk you through how to use the AutoControl Chrome extension to let you jump between Chrome tabs while Chrome is in the Full Screen mode. The AutoControl extension will also let you zoom in and zoom out while in ESASky and WorldWide Telescope Web by pressing keys on your PC numeric pad.
Figure 29 – First, open the Chrome menu on the right of your screen by clicking the three vertical dots in the upper right of your screen. Go to Extensions and then click on Visit Chrome Web Store.
Figure 30 – When you get to the Chrome Web Store, search for the AutoControl extension and install it on Chrome.
Figure 31 – Then go back to the Chrome menu and click on Manage Extensions.
Figure 32 – Find the AutoControl extension and click on its Details. Scroll down until you see "Extension options" and click on it.
Figure 33 – This will open the AutoControl configuration page. Click on Help for instructions on how you can program AutoControl.
I use the following settings:
Trigger Action
Numpad 0 SWITCH TO LEFT TAB
Numpad Point SWITCH TO RIGHT TAB
Numpad 1 SCROLL UP
Numpad 2 TOGGLE FULL SCREEN
Numpad 3 SCROLL DOWN
Numpad 4 BACK
Numpad 5 CLOSE WINDOW
Numpad 6 FORWARD
Numpad 7 SWITCH TO LEFTMOST TAB
Numpad 8 TOGGLE MINIMIZE
Numpad 9 CLOSE TAB
Numpad + OPEN NEW TAB
This allows me to do things like go back and forth between Full Screen and Normal Screen while in Chrome by pressing Numpad 2 and to move from tab to tab while remaining in Full Screen. I can also use Numpad 1 to zoom in and Numpad 3 to zoom out while using ESASky and WorldWide Telescope Web in Full Screen.
Comments are welcome at
scj333@sbcglobal.net
To see all posts on softwarephysics in reverse order go to:
https://softwarephysics.blogspot.com/
Regards,
Steve Johnston
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