We present recent Aladin’s developments designed to handle and display the astronomical time dimension. Aladin was originally dedicated to visualise astronomical data in terms of spatial coordinates. Based on the same technology, we have incorporated a new dimension in Aladin: the time. This new Aladin prototype, based on the core of Version 10, incorporates two new components: a “time view” window and a “time coverage” capability. The “time view” window is a simple Aladin extension to its regular window originally designed to handle longitude VS latitude graphics. This new graphic method is dedicated to draw scatter plots where the primary axis is time and the secondary axis can be magnitude, flux, radial velocity, etc. The original spatial view and the new time view are fully interoperable allowing the users to select objects in either views to see them selected in all views simultaneously. The “time coverage” capability is based on the technology supporting the Multi-Ordered Coverage (MOCs), replacing the HEALPix space discretisation with a time scale instead. Thus the way the user manipulates time coverage is similar to space coverage manipulation, for instance performing fast coverage intersections or unions, generating a coverage from a list of sources, etc. These new capabilities are already available in the Aladin Beta version available on the Aladin CDS Web site.
Link to PDF (may not be available yet): P8-3.pdf