Abstract
We present Firefly, a new browser-based interactive tool for visualizing 3D particle data sets. On a typical personal computer, Firefly can simultaneously render and enable real-time interactions with ≳10 million particles, and can interactively explore data sets with billions of particles using the included custom-built octree render engine. Once created, viewing a Firefly visualization requires no installation and is immediately usable in most modern internet browsers simply by visiting a URL. As a result, a Firefly visualization works out-of-the-box on most devices including smartphones and tablets. Firefly is primarily developed for researchers to explore their own data, but can also be useful to communicate results to researchers and/or collaborators and as an effective public outreach tool. Every element of the user interface can be customized and disabled, enabling easy adaptation of the same visualization for different audiences with little additional effort. Creating a new Firefly visualization is simple with the provided Python data preprocessor that translates input data to a Firefly-compatible format and provides helpful methods for hosting instances of Firefly both locally and on the internet. In addition to visualizing the positions of particles, users can visualize vector fields (e.g., velocities) and also filter and color points by scalar fields. We share three examples of Firefly applied to astronomical data sets: (1) the FIRE cosmological zoom-in simulations, (2) the SDSS galaxy catalog, and (3) Gaia Data Release 3. A gallery of additional interactive demos is available at alexbgurvi.ch/Firefly.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Article number | 38 |
| Journal | Astrophysical Journal, Supplement Series |
| Volume | 265 |
| Issue number | 2 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Apr 1 2023 |
Funding
This software was based on a prototype by Alessandro Fabretti comissioned by Claude-Andr\u00E9 Faucher-Gigu\u00E8re and student contributors include Larry Luolei, Nora Linzer, and Mahlet Shiferaw. The authors would like to thank Claude-Andr\u00E9 Faucher-Gigu\u00E8re for his support and guidance; Zachary Hafen for his usage of Firefly, which inspired many of the features presented in this paper; them both for their extremely useful comments, which improved the quality of this manuscript; Matthew Turk and Cameron Hummels for their guidance and support while developing Firefly; Mariangela Bernardi and Helena Dominguez Sanchez for their helpful advice and guidance in preparing the SDSS test data set. A.B.G. was supported by an NSF-GRFP under grant DGE-1842165 and was additionally supported by NSF grants DGE-0948017 and DGE-145000. This research was supported in part through the computational resources and staff contributions provided for the Quest high-performance computing facility at Northwestern University, which is jointly supported by the Office of the Provost, the Office for Research, and Northwestern University Information Technology. Additional support for student contributors and computational resources came from NSF AST-1715216, AST-2108230, and CAREER award AST-1652522 and a Cottrell Scholar Award to Claude-Andr\u00E9 Faucher-Gigu\u00E8re.
ASJC Scopus subject areas
- Astronomy and Astrophysics
- Space and Planetary Science