AstroInspect: a web-based system to organize, assess, and visually inspect astronomical objects

TL;DR

The first release of the AstroInspect is presented, a web-based system which provides an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) through which users can upload catalogs of objects defined by celestial coordinates and which highlights the potential of AstroInspect to support efficient visual inspection workflows.

Abstract

The rapid growth of imaging and spectroscopic surveys has intensified the need for efficient tools that support visual inspection, a practice that remains essential for tasks such as classification, catalog refinement, and validation of automated methods. Existing solutions, however, often require the use of multiple platforms and complex workflows to integrate heterogeneous data. To address this challenge, we present the first release of the AstroInspect (https://astroinspect.github.io), a web-based system which ensures seamless access to several astronomical resources. The system provides an intuitive graphical user interface (GUI) through which users can upload catalogs of objects defined by celestial coordinates. AstroInspect automatically enriches these catalogs with complementary information, including imaging, spectroscopic, and photometric data retrieved in real time from surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the Legacy Surveys (LS), and the Southern Photometric Local Universe Survey (S-PLUS). As an example of its scientific utility, we used AstroInspect to identify H$α$ emission-line galaxies within a 7 deg radius in the direction of the Hydra I cluster (also known as Abell 1060) by visual inspection. Using a candidate set of 981 galaxies selected from S-PLUS photometric data, we produced a catalog of 80 galaxies with confirmed H$α$ emission. These results highlight the potential of AstroInspect to support efficient visual inspection workflows.

Figures (7)

• Figure 1: The AstroInspect interface streamlines visual inspection and scientific analysis by integrating spectroscopic, photometric, and imaging data into a single view, allowing "on-the-fly" comparative analyses. The user-uploaded catalog is organized into an interactive tabular interface that merges the input data (e.g. "ra", "dec", and "r_auto" columns) with dynamically-obtained data from remote services, such as redshift (e.g. "z" column from the SDSS spectroscopic catalog), the spectral energy distribution ("spectra" column), and color images from different surveys (e.g. "S-PLUS", "LS", "Galex (NUV)", "unWISE (W1)", and "2MASS (K)" columns, respectively). To support more effective visual assessment, AstroInspect also enables customization of image rendering parameters, including color stretch functions, colormap selection, and field-of-view adjustments.
• Figure 2: A schematic of the AstroInspect system architecture, illustrating the interaction of its core components. The Table State Manager (TSM) maintains the global application state, and the Table I/O Handler (TIOH) manages data import and export. Concurrent task execution is managed by two specialized pools: the Worker Task Pool (WTP), which orchestrates computationally intensive tasks in isolated threads via workers running Python code, and the Asynchronous Task Pool (ATP), which handles I/O tasks via non-blocking Javascript functions running in main thread. The Request Listener of the Worker interacts with the Python Runtime calling functions and receiving their results back via Foreign Function Interface (FFI), which enables data exchange between the JavaScript and Python. The Message Broker facilitates Inter-Thread Communication (ITC) between workers and the main thread. The executors (workers or asynchronous functions) can retrieve resources from Astronomical Web Services through Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). After a task is completed, its results (output data or error message) are dispatched to the TSM, being able to be displayied in the GUI. Peripheral components interact with the TSM based on user actions. Solid arrows represent the data flow between components, while dashed arrows shows an optional relation between ATP and WTP forming hybrid tasks, in which the ATP initiates the task by performing I/O operations, forwards processing workloads to the WTP, and receives the result back, following a client-server relationship.
• Figure 3: Empirical correction factor ($\eta$) as a function of the $r$-band magnitude ($r_\mathrm{mag}$) used to estimate the optimal field of view (FOV) for the stamps. Two interpolation schemes were employed to represent $\eta$: step interpolation (rank 0, dashed line) and linear interpolation (rank 1, solid line). The linear interpolation was implemented in AstroInspect, as it provides a better fit for brighter objects.
• Figure 4: Adjustment of the LS image cutouts for twelve galaxies. The upper two rows show objects with $r$-band magnitude range from 8 to 14 mag, while the lower two rows show objects with $r$-band magnitude range from 14 to 20 mag. In the first and third rows, the panels illustrate the initial fields of view (FOVs) manually defined prior to the visual inspection procedure described in Section \ref{['sec:stamps']}. The blue circle marks the effective radius ($r_e$), scaled according to the Eq. \ref{['eq:fov']}. The white square indicates the bounding box associated with this circle. The second and fourth rows present the final automatically adjusted cutouts, whose FOVs correspond to the bounding boxes shown above.
• Figure 5: Screenshot of the AstroInspect interface that allows mapping each of the 12 filters of the S-PLUS photometric system ($u$, F378, F395, F410, F430, $g$, F515, $r$, F660, $i$, F861, $z$) to a channel in the RGB (red, green, and blue) color space. The configuration shows the use of filters $u$, F378, F395, F410, F430, and $g$ in the blue channel, F660 (H$\alpha$) alone in the green channel, and F515, $r$, $i$, F861, and $z$ in the red channel. The flexibility of this visualization tool allows users to create color composites that determine how physical information will be visually encoded in the image.