A New Approach to Explore Integral Field Spectroscopy Data

Abstract

Integral field spectroscopy (IFS) is a technique that is widely used in astronomy. It gives simultaneously the spectra of each spatial sampling element of a given field, generating a large amount of information that is also known as data cube. Visualizing and exploring these data cubes in a flexible and an intuitive way is a challenge. Although the information collected is three-dimensional (representing the I(x, y, l) function) and the scientific community generally recognizes the need to use 3D visualization tools, two dimensional tools are usually used to visualize the data cubes and very few 3D exploration techniques have been proposed specifically for astrophysics. This paper presents an interactive method to explore IFS data and two different GPU implementations of it.