Multi-Resolution HEALPix Maps for Multi-Wavelength and Multi-Messenger Astronomy
Abstract
HEALPix -- the Hierarchical Equal Area isoLatitude Pixelization -- has become a standard in high-energy and gravitational wave astronomy. Originally developed to improve the efficiency of all-sky Fourier analyses, it is now also utilized to share sky localization information. When used for this purpose the need for a homogeneous all-sky grid represents a limitation that hinders a broader community adoption. This work presents mhealpy, a Python library able to create, handle and analyze multi-resolution maps, a solution to this problem. It supports efficient pixel querying, arithmetic operations between maps, adaptive mesh refinement, plotting and serialization into FITS -- Flexible Image Transport System -- files. This HEALPix extension makes it suitable to represent highly resolved regions, resulting in a convenient common format to share spatial information for joint multi-wavelength and multi-messenger analyses.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2111.11240,
title = {Multi-Resolution HEALPix Maps for Multi-Wavelength and Multi-Messenger Astronomy},
author = {I. Martinez-Castellanos and Leo P. Singer and E. Burns and D. Tak and Alyson Joens and Judith L. Racusin and Jeremy S. Perkins},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2111.11240},
year = {2022}
}
Comments
Submitted to the AAS journals. mhealpy is an open-source project. Documentation is available at https://mhealpy.readthedocs.io