HEALPix Viewer

Render a HEALPix data set in false color using modern OpenGL techniques. The purpose of this project is mostly to bring myself up to speed with modern OpenGL (and un-learn archaisms like glBegin(GL_TRIANGLE_STRIP)).

This is inspired by Damien George's excellent CMB visualization at http://thecmb.org. However, it suffers from less distortion because it implements the HEALPix projection itself (instead of a geodesic approximation of it).

Requirements

Building requires:

• GLFW http://www.glfw.org
• GLM http://glm.g-truc.net
• CHealpix http://healpix.sourceforge.net
• CFitsio http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/fitsio/fitsio.html
• a C++ compiler, make, and pkgconfig

If, like me, you are on a Mac with MacPorts (https://trac.macports.org), you can get all of the dependencies with:

sudo port install glfw glm healpix-c

To build

Just run make.

Usage

Just pass the name of a (possibly gzip-compressed) FITS file, like this:

$ healpixviewer INPUT.fits[.gz]

Here's an example sky map from a paper I am working on:

$ wget http://ligo.org/science/first2years/2015/compare/18951/bayestar.fits.gz
$ ./healpixviewer bayestar.fits.gz