ESASky User Forum / Whiteboard
Welcome to the ESASky user forum! The aim of this forum is to have a place to collect feature requests from users, allow conversations between users and gauge the Astronomy community's priorities related to the ESASky application. We welcome requests for the ESASky, its documentation, its ways of interacting with the community, and any functionality which you think would be widely useful to the Astronomy community.
Please suggest and vote on feature requests below. Before adding a new suggestion, use the search function to see if the idea has already been posted. Please include links to relevant repositories and existing issues in the description of the feature request. Also consider including links to code or images demonstrating the requested functionality.
You can also use this forum to report bugs or request small improvements to existing functionality.
Other places to get help and communicate with the ESASky team are:
- @ESAESDC on Twitter
- The ESASky newsletter
- The team's info email address (esaskyinfo at sciops.esa.int)
- The ESASky helpdesk (requires registration)
The ESASky Project is dedicated to maintaining a positive, inclusive, successful, and growing community. Please observe the usual basic internet citizen rules before posting to this forum.
Search for more than one object
Hi,
I use ESASky to prepare my observations in telescopes, and it would be really good to have the option to search for more than one object, for instance to measure the angular distance between both of them.
Thanks,
Nuria
define overlays (e.g. cone search regions) via URL parameters
Hi,
it would be great if you could add optional paramters to the URL that allow to define sky regions around the central position. This would allow to load ESASky centered on a position (e.g. the best fit location of a new, possibly transient, source) AND show the uncertainty of this best fit position. This is exremely helpful to find possible MWL counterparts to the new source.
In Aladin Lite this feature is available via the use of overlays directly in the URL. An example (defining a circular region of radius 1.5deg):
https://aladin.cds.unistra.fr/AladinLite/?overlays=[{ "type": "graphic", "name": "uncertainty", "color": "darkgrey", "lineWidth": 4, "items": [ { "type": "circle", "ra": 288.4037, "dec": 0.3537, "radius": 1.5 } ]}]&target=19 13 36.89+0 21 13.32&fov=63.4675
Thanks a lot for your great work on ESASky!
Fabian (on behalf of the Astro-COLIBRI team)
Gaia Proper Motion display formats
The format of Gaia DR3 columns has changed recently as shown in the attached screenshot so that, for example, "Proper Motion in RA" is shown in the HH MM SS format usual for RA proper. This doesn't make much sense and I don't think it's me. The same applies to "Proper Motion in Dec" and both their errors.
Source error regions
It would be very useful at least to have an option to plot catalogue sources with symbols the size of the error region (or source extent) . For instance, when comparing XMM and Chandra source lists of the same region, this would give a good idea of how well they agree.
author search failed
I searched for author Carole Mundell and got the attached error in loading the list of papers.
do not find some Gaia DR2 sources
I am searching for sources in ESASKy one by one using 'source_id' label.
There are some that, for whatever reason, it doesn't find them for me.
I find:
Gaia DR2 3347696388965946752
Gaia DR2 341867587319687808080
I do not find:
Gaia DR2 332351565654370895104
Gaia DR2 3335642026377082496
Gaia DR2 154466544592085888
Gaia DR2 3419692199896487680
Uploading user tables
It would really be great, if we can upload our own user tables to use beside the catalogues that are available online. It would significantly speed up the work of surveying ESA Sky for specific types of objects. This is particularly useful for those of us that are working on Gaia objects.
SIMBAD search results
On clicking the SIMBAD search icon, in my case under a Gaia DR3 source, the result is unexpectedly downloaded in a text file called "simbad.txt" rather than displayed in a new browser window as used to be the case and is still so with all the other icons NED et al.
Cannot upload target list
I cannot upload a target list in the usual format. I get the menu when I click the corresponding button, open the file browser when I click on "Upload target list" and I can select the file, but is never loaded. I am using Firefox 106.0.1 on Mac OS 10.15.7, but tried also Chrome 107.0.5304.87 with the same result, and also one of my students tried in front of me (not sure which OS and browser) with no success. We were
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