ALMA Science Archive remote visualization with CARTA

We are proud to announce that CARTA has been integrated into the ALMA Science Archive (ASA).

CARTA, the Cube Analysis and Rendering Tool for Astronomy, is a new image visualization and analysis tool designed for ALMA, VLA, and SKA pathfinders.

Now all 500,000+ ALMA science FITS files in the ALMA archive can be previewed using CARTA (excluding Cycle 0). After selecting one or more projects on the Archive Query Interface and navigating to the ALMA Request Handler page, expand a data product folder and look for the CARTA logo under the Actions column associated with each FITS image (Highlighted by the red circle). 

Once you click on it, CARTA will automatically open in a new web browser tab and display the image (Please make sure to allow the ASA to open pop-ups in your web browser first).

CARTA utilizes client-server architecture, parallelization, GPU-accelerated rendering, and various latency-hiding techniques. The user interacts through the client interface running natively in their local web browser. Large images (TB-size ready) hosted from a remote server can be visualized within seconds. As you can imagine, this makes it the ideal software to integrate with the ASA.

CARTA, originally an ALMA development project from 2014 to 2016, is now jointly developed by teams at the Academia Sinica Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA) in Taiwan, the Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA) in South Africa, the National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) in the United States, and the Department of Physics, University of Alberta in Canada.

For more information, please visit the CARTA homepage. Try the Desktop version of CARTA on your local computer, or ask your system administrator to set up an institute-wide shared server version of CARTA. If you have any comments or suggestions for future features, please fill out the 'Feature Survey' available on the CARTA homepage, and for other questions contact the  CARTA Helpdesk.