ann2109 — Announcement

Announcement of the ESA/Hubble and ESA Sky Collaboration

20 October 2021

The ESA/Hubble and ESASky team have collaboratively developed an application programming interface that connects the outreach images on the ESA/Hubble website with the ESASky application, which allows users to visualise public astronomical data.

When users dive in the Whirlpool Galaxy details, navigate the colors of the Crab Nebula, or surf through the Pillars of Creation, users can now enjoy an interactive tour of all public outreach images taken with the Hubble Space Telescope on ESASky's virtual planetarium. The ESA/Hubble outreach image pages now link to the appropriate locations on the ESASky platform.

ESASky is a web-based app, powered by CDS's Aladin, which helps users to interact with outreach astronomical images and datasets taken in different bands of light; including those obtained by ESA missions.

As a unique educational tool, users who are interested in the more detailed science behind Hubble’s wide variety of breathtaking images can now also enjoy data-driven tools in ESASky. This includes finding Hubble's science-ready archival datasets used in the public outreach images, or overlaying ESA's Gaia catalogue on top of a cluster image taken by Hubble to better understand the movements and characteristics of stars in a given cluster.

This project was made possible through a mutual creative effort between ESA/Hubble and ESASky teams, led by ESA/Hubble's image specialists Mahdi Zamani and Mattias Wångblad from the ESASky team, and the integral coordination efforts of Deborah Baines and Nuria Alvarez Crespo of the ESAC Science Data Centre.