Towards the exploration of astrophysical datacubes through volumetric rendering within CARTA — E8 Intelligence Research

Data products from astrophysical observations may contain three or more dimensions: most commonly two spatial dimensions and a third spectral dimension, and possibly additional axes such as polarisation or time. Visualising three-dimensional image data is particularly useful for analysing the kinematics and evolution of various objects; however, the large scale of data produced by next-generation observatories and the complexity of displaying 3D data on a 2D screen make visualisation challenging. In this article, we present a scalable and interactive 3D visualisation approach within the astronomy software CARTA. We implemented a prototype 3D rendering widget with ThreeJS and known techniques to improve efficiency (e.g. compression, downsampling) and found that large datacubes up to 128 GB can be visualised locally with a loading time of a few minutes. We analysed the performance in the frontend and in the backend, finding that the bottleneck of our implementation lies in the frontend. Author: Andrew Stewart Caldin, Independent Researcher, UK. Part of the E8 Intelligence Research series. Platform: e8intelligence.com