HiPS

Hierarchical Progressive Surveys

HiPS : Hierarchical Progressive Surveys

HiPS is the hierarchical tiling mechanism which allows one to access, visualize and browse seamlessly image, catalogue and cube data.

This page provides links to HiPS documentations and tools notably to generate progressive surveys from your own datasets.

Image and catalogue HiPS visualized in Aladin Lite

The Aladin Lite application above gives you an overview of what HiPS are. Zoom in on a particular region and better resolution tiles for the DSS2 background survey will be loaded. Red square represent SIMBAD objects. Zooming in will reveal more and more sources.

1290 HiPS are currently available from twenty HiPS servers.

The HiPS method is developped by CDS since 2009. In October 2015, the International Virtual Observatory Alliance decided to standardize HiPS. The HIPS Recommendation 1.0 is available on the IVOA site.
A HiPS reference paper is also available since 2015 in A&A → 2015A&A...578A.114F.

HiPS can be visualized in Aladin Desktop (CDS), Aladin Lite (CDS), Stellarium, MIZAR (CNES), hscMap (NAOJ) and various Web pages mainly based on Aladin Lite code notably ESAsky (ESA), ESO Science portal (ESO) and JUDO2 (JAXA)).

Generate your own HiPS from image/cube data

Generate your own HiPS from catalogue data

Validate HiPS

  • HiPS IVOA compatibility: download and use Hipsgen.jar with the action LINT
    java -jar Hipsgen.jar out="directory" LINT
  • HiPS list IVOA compatibility: download and use Hipslint.jar
    java -jar Hipslint.jar "http://urlOfHiPSlist..."

Generate FITS images cutouts

The hips2fits service allows one to generate FITS images cutouts of arbitrary size and resolution from a given HiPS.