Scale-Aware Navigation of Astronomical Survey Imagery Data on High Resolution Immersive Displays
This work addresses the problem of fragmented context during exploration for astronomers using upcoming surveys, though it is incremental as it focuses on design insights rather than new computational methods.
The paper tackles the challenge of exploring astronomical survey imagery that spans many spatial scales by presenting a design-oriented framework for scale-aware navigation in high-resolution immersive displays, using Vera Rubin Observatory and Milky Way survey imagery to illustrate usage scenarios.
Upcoming astronomical surveys produce imagery that spans many orders of magnitude in spatial scale, requiring scientists to reason fluidly between global structure and local detail. Data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory exemplifies this challenge, as traditional desktop-based workflows often rely on discrete views or static cutouts that fragment context during exploration. This paper presents a design-oriented framework for scale-aware navigation of astronomical survey imagery in high-resolution immersive display environments. We illustrate these principles through representative usage scenarios using Vera Rubin Observatory and Milky Way survey imagery deployed in room-scale immersive environments, including tiled high-resolution displays and curved immersive systems. Our goal is to contribute design insights that inform the development of immersive interaction paradigms for exploratory analysis of extreme-scale scientific imagery.