Data: catalogues and formats

Gaia Sky needs to first load data in order to display it. The internal structure of these data is a scenegraph, which is basically a tree with nodes. The objects that are displayed in a scene are all nodes in this scene graph and are organized in a hierarchical manner depending on their geometrical and spatial relations.

Hint

The data nodes in the scene graph are of multiple natures and are loaded differently depending on their type. Here we can make the first big distinction in the data nodes depending on where they come from.

The different types of data are:

Catalogue data – usually stars which come from a star catalogue. In this group we have two different approaches: single particles and particle groups. The TLDR version says that the single particles method is fundamentally slower and CPU-bound, while the particle groups method is faster and GPU-based. Therefore, single particles are deprecated.
Rest of data – planets, orbits, constellations, grids and everything else qualifies for this category.

Data belonging to either group will be loaded differently into the Gaia Sky. The sections below describe the data format in detail:

General information on the data loading mechanisms

Gaia Sky implements a very flexible an open data mechanism. The data to be loaded is defined in a couple of keys in the global.properties configuration file, which is usually located in the $GS_CONFIG folder (see folders). The keys are:

data.json.catalog – contains a comma-separated list of data files which point to the catalogs to load. These files have usually the data/catalog-*.json format.
data.json.objects – contains a comma-separated list of data files which point to the files with the rest of the data. By default, only the data/data-main.json file is there.

Now, all the files in either properties have a very similar format, and nothing prevents you from putting catalogues into the objects file. However, the distinction is a semantic one, since the data defined in each file are fundamentally different. Also, Gaia Sky includes an option to choose the catalog(s) to load at startup using a GUI window (set property program.dataset.dialog to true to enable), and in this manner only the catalogue files can be modified.

Additionally, any file with the format autoload-*.json in the data folder will be automatically parsed and loaded using the default JSON loader.

catalog-*.json example files

{
    "name" : "TGAS+HYG (GPU)",
    "description" : "Gaia DR1 TGAS catalog, GPU version. About 1.5 million stars.",
    "data" : [{
        "loader": "gaiasky.data.JsonLoader",
        "files": [ "data/particles-tgas.json" ]
    }]
}

{
    "name" : "TGAS - 12.5%",
    "description" : "Gaia DR1 TGAS catalog (12.5% error). About 700K stars.",
    "data" : [{
        "loader": "gaiasky.data.group.OctreeGroupLoader",
        "files": [ "data/octree/tgas/group-bin/particles/", "data/octree/tgas/group-bin/metadata.bin" ]
    }]
}

data-main.json example file

{
    "data" : [
    {
        "loader": "gaiasky.data.JsonLoader",
        "files": [ "data/planets-normal.json",
                    "data/moons-normal.json",
                    "data/satellites.json",
                    "data/asteroids.json",
                    "data/orbits_planet.json",
                    "data/orbits_moon.json",
                    "data/orbits_asteroid.json",
                    "data/orbits_satellite.json",
                    "data/extra-low.json",
                    "data/locations.json",
                    "data/locations_earth.json",
                    "data/locations_moon.json"]
    },
    {
        "loader": "gaiasky.data.stars.SunLoader",
        "files": [ "" ]
    },
    {
        "loader": "gaiasky.data.constel.ConstellationsLoader",
        "files": [ "data/constel_hip.csv" ]
    },
    {
        "loader": "gaiasky.data.constel.ConstelBoundariesLoader",
        "files": [ "data/boundaries.csv" ]
    }
]}

The format in all files is the same. There is a "data" property, which is a list of pairs containing [loader: files] correspondences. Each "loader" contains the classes that will load the list of files under the corresponding "files" property. Obviously, each loader needs to know how to load the provided files.

As of version 2.1.0, any descriptor file with the format autoload-*.json dropped into the data folder will be loaded by default without need to be referenced from any of the properties.

Gaia Sky data loading diagram

The files are sent to the Scene Graph JSON Loader, which iterates on each loader-files pair in each file, instantiates the loader and uses it to load the files. All loaders need to adhere to a contract, defined in the interface ISceneGraphLoader –here–. The loadData() method of each loader must return a list of Scene Graph objects, which is then added to a global list containing all the previously loaded files. At the end, we have a list with all the objects in the scene. This list is passed on to the Scene Graph instance, which constructs the screne graph tree structure which will contains the object model.

As we said, each loader will load a different kind of data; the JSONLoader –here– loads non-catalog data (planets, satellites, orbits, etc.), the STILDataProvider –here– loads VOTables, FITS, CSV and other files through the STIL library, ConstellationsLoader –here– and ConstellationsBoundariesLoader –here– load constellation data and constellation boundary data respectively and so on.

Particle data

Particle data refers to the loading of particles (stars, galaxies, etc.) where each gets an object in the internal scene graph model. This allows for selection, labeling, levels of detail, etc.

There are several off-the-shelf options to get local data in various formats into Gaia Sky.

In order to load local data there are a series of default options which can be combined. As described in the general data loading section, multiple catalogue loaders can be used at once. Each catalog loader will get a list of files to load. A description of the main local catalog loaders follows.

Particle groups

As of version 1.5.0, Gaia Sky offers a new data type, the particle group. Particle groups can be either point particles or stars (defined by star groups). Particle data are read from a file using a certain particle/star group provider implementation, and these data are sent to GPU memory where they reside. This approach allows for these objects to be composed of hundreds of thousands of particles and still have a minimal impact on performance.

Let’s see an example of the definition of one of such particle groups in the Oort cloud:

{
    "name" : "Oort cloud",
    "position" : [0.0, 0.0, 0.0],
    "color" : [0.9, 0.9, 0.9, 0.8],
    "size" : 2.0,
    "labelcolor" : [0.3, 0.6, 1.0, 1.0],
    "labelposition" : [0.0484814, 0.0, 0.0484814],
    "ct" : "Others",

    "fadein" : [0.0004, 0.004],
    "fadeout" : [0.1, 15.0],

    "profiledecay" : 1.0,

    "parent" : "Universe",
    "impl" : "gaiasky.scenegraph.ParticleGroup",

    "provider" : "gaiasky.data.group.PointDataProvider",
    "factor" :  149.597871,
    "datafile" : "data/oort/oort_10000particles.dat"
}

Let’s go over the attributes:

Star groups

As of version 1.5.0, entire star catalogs can also be provided as a special type of particle groups: star groups. The stars in a star group will function very much like their single particles counterparts. They are rendered using the magnitude and color information, they are selectable and focusable, they can render labels and proper motions, and they get close-up detail quads. Since most of the rendering is GPU-based using VBOs, and there’s only one object in the scene graph for the whole star group, this method is much more performant than the single particles method. Also, to update some model information a background thread is spawned for every star group which sorts the particles in the background according to their current view angle.

To define a catalog containing a star group, we need to create a pointer and load it using the regular JsonLoader:

{
    "name" : "TGAS+HYG (GPU)",
    "description" : "Gaia DR1 TGAS catalog, GPU version. About 1.5 million stars.",
    "data" : [{
        "loader": "gaiasky.data.JsonLoader",
        "files": [ "data/tgas-pg.json" ]
    }]
}

The file tgas-pg.json contains a single object with the actual star group definition:

{
    "objects" : [{
        "name" : "TGAS",
        "position" : [0.0, 0.0, 0.0],
        "color" : [1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.25],
        "size" : 6.0,
        "labelcolor" : [1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 1.0],
        "labelposition" : [0.0, -5.0e7, -4.0e8],
        "ct" : "Stars",

        "fadeout" : [21.0e2, 0.5e5],

        "profiledecay" : 1.0,

        "parent" : "Universe",
        "impl" : "gaiasky.scenegraph.StarGroup",

        "provider" : "gaiasky.data.group.SerializedDataProvider",
        "datafile" : "data/catalog/tgashyg.bin"
    }]
}

In this case, the data file, tgashyg.bin, is a binary file which contains java objects serialized. These can be loaded using the SerializedDataProvider. However, anyone can implement a new provider to load any other kind of catalog file by implementing the IStarGroupDataProvider –here interface.

Star groups can also be combined with octrees (levels of detail method) to allow for huge catalogs like DR2 (hundreds of millions of points). This option is still not implemented.

Octree catalog loader

As of version 1.5.0, a new on-demand catalog loader exists, called Octree multifile loader. This is a version of the octree catalog loader specially designed for very large datasets. This version does not load everything at startup. It needs the catalog to be organised into several files, each one corresponding to a particluar octree node. This is an option in the OctreeGeneratorTest. Back to the loader, it can pre-load files down to a certain depth level; the rest of the files will be loaded when needed and unloaded if necessary. This offers a convenient way in which the data is streamed from disk to the main memory as the user explores the dataset. It also results in a very fast program startup. This loader is called OctreeMultiFileLoader and is implemented here.

Some discussion on memory issues and the streaming loader can be found here.

STIL data provider

As of version v0.704 the Gaia Sky supports all formats supported by the STIL library. Since the data held by the formats supported by STIL is not of a unique nature, this catalog loader makes a series of assumptions. More information can be found in STIL data provider.

Particularly, it is possible to directly load a VOTable or a csv file into Gaia Sky using the Open file icon at the bottom of the control panel.

Non-particle data: Planets, Moons, Asteroids, etc.

Most of the entities and celestial bodies that are not stars in the Gaia Sky scene are defined in a series of json files and are loaded using the JsonLoader –here–. The format is very flexible and loosely matches the underneath data model, which is a scene graph tree.

Top-level objects

All objects in the json files must have at least the following 5 properties:

name: The name of the object.
color: The colour of the object. This will translate to the line colour in orbits, to the colour of the point for planets when they are far away and to the colour of the grid in grids.
ct – The ComponentType –here–. This is basically a string that will be matched to the entity type in ComponentType enum. Valid component types are Stars, Planets, Moons, Satellites, Atmospheres, Constellations, etc.
impl – The package and class name of the implementing class.
parent: The name of the parent entity.

Additionally, different types of entities accept different additional parameters which are matched to the model using reflection. Here are some examples of these parameters:

size – The size of the entity, usually the radius in km.
appmag – The apparent magnitude.
absmag – The absolute magnitude.

Below is an example of a simple entity, the equatorial grid:

{
    "name" : "Equatorial grid",
    "color" : [1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.5],
    "size" : 1.2e12,
    "ct" : "Equatorial",

    "parent" : "Universe",
    "impl" : "gaiasky.scenegraph.Grid"
}

Planets, moons, asteroids and all rigid bodies

Planets, moons and asteroids all use the model object Planet -here-. This provides a series of utilities that make their json specifications look similar.

Coordinates

Within the coordinates object one specifies how to get the positional data of the entity given a time. This object contains a reference to the implementation class (which must implement IBodyCoordinates -here-) and the necessary parameters to initialize it. There are currently a bunch of implementations that can be of use:

OrbitLintCoordinates – The coordinates of the object are linearly interpolated using the data of its orbit, which is defined in a separated entity. See the [[Orbits|Non-particle-data-loading#orbits]] section for more info. The name of the orbit entity must be given. For instance, the Hygieia moon uses orbit coordinates.

{
    "coordinates" : {
        "impl" : "gaiasky.util.coord.OrbitLintCoordinates",
        "orbitname" : "Hygieia orbit"
    }
}

StaticCoordinates – For entities that never move. A position is required. For instance, the Milky Way object uses static coordinates:

{
    "coordinates" : {
        "impl" : "gaiasky.util.coord.StaticCoordinates",
        "position" : [-2.169e17, -1.257e17, -1.898e16]
    }
}

AbstractVSOP87 – Used for the major planets, these coordinates

implement the VSOP87 algorithms. Only the implementation is needed. For instance, the Earth uses these coordinates.

{
    "coordinates" : {
        "impl" : "gaiasky.util.coord.vsop87.EarthVSOP87"
    }
}

GaiaCoordinates – Special coordinates for Gaia.
MoonAACoordinates – Special coordinates for the moon using the algorithm described in the book Astronomical Algorithms by Jean Meeus.

Rotation

The rotation object describes, as you may imagine, the rigid rotation of the body in question. A rotation is described by the following parameters:

period – The rotation period in hours.
axialtilt – The axial tilt is the angle between the equatorial plane of the body and its orbital plane. In degrees.
inclination – The inclination is the angle between the orbital plane and the ecliptic. In degrees.
ascendingnode – The ascending node in degrees.
meridianangle – The meridian angle in degrees.

For instance, the rotation of Mars:

{
    "rotation": {
        "period" : 24.622962156,
        "axialtilt" : 25.19,
        "inclination" : 1.850,
        "ascendingnode" : 47.68143,
        "meridianangle" : 176.630
    }
}

Model

This object describes the model which must be used to represent the entity. Models can have two origins:

They may come from a 3D model file. In this case, you just need to specify the file.

{
    "model": {
      "args" : [true],
      "model" : "data/models/gaia/gaia.g3db"
    }
}

They may be generated on the fly. In this case, you need to specify the type of model, a series of parameters and the material.

{
    "model": {
      "args" : [true],
      "type" : "sphere",
      "params" : {
        "quality" : 180,
        "diameter" : 1.0,
        "flip" : false
        },
      "material" : {
        "base" : "data/tex/base/earth-day*.jpg",
        "specular" : "data/tex/base/earth-specular*.jpg",
        "normal" : "data/tex/base/earth-normal*.jpg",
        "night" : "data/tex/base/earth-night*.jpg",
        "hieght" : "data/tex/base/earth-height*.jpg",
        "heightScale" : 8.12,
        "reflection" : [ 1.0, 1.0, 0.0 ],
        "elevation" : {
            "noiseType" : "opensimplex",
            "noiseSize" : 10.0,
            "noiseOctaves" : [[1.0, 4.0, 8.0], [1.0, 0.25, 0.125]],
            "noisePower" : 1.0
      }
    }
}

type – the type of model. Possible values are sphere, disc, cylinder and ring.
params – parameters of the model. This depends on the type. The quality is the number of both horizontal and vertical divisions. The diameter is the diameter of the model and flip indicates whether the normals should be flipped to face outwards. The ring type also accepts innerradius and outerradius.
material – properties of the material, such as textures, reflections, elevation, etc.
- base – the diffuse texture to use.
- specular – the specular map to produce specular reflections.
- normal – normal map to produce extra detail in the lighting.
- night – texture applied to the part of the model in the shade.
- height – height map which will be represented with tessellation or parallax mapping (see graphics configuration) and whose scale is defined in heightScale (in Km). It can also contain the keyworkd "generate". In such case, a new subobject "elevation" is expected.
  - noiseType – type of noise. Accepted values are opensimplex and perlin.
  - noiseSize – extent of the noise map to generate.
  - noiseOctaves – a 2xN matrix containing pairs of [frequency, amplitude] for the noise octaves.
  - noisePower – exponent of a power operation on the generated noise (n=n^power).
- reflection – specifies an index or a color. If this is present, the default skymap will be used to generate reflections on the surface of the material. Hint: look up the Reflections object in Gaia Sky. It is defined in satellites.json.

Atmosphere

Planet atmospheres can also be defined using this object. The atmosphere object gets a number of physical quantities that are fed in the atmospheric scattering algorithm (Sean O’Neil, GPU Gems).

{
    "atmosphere" : {
        "size" : 6600.0,
        "wavelengths" : [0.650, 0.570, 0.475],
        "m_Kr" : 0.0025,
        "m_Km" : 0.001,

        "params" : {
            "quality" : 180,
            "diameter" : 2.0,
            "flip" : true
        }
    }
}

Orbits

When we talk about orbits in this context we talk about orbit lines. In the Gaia Sky orbit lines may be created from two different sources. The sources are used by a class implementing the IOrbitDataProvider –here– interface, which is also specified in ther orbit object.

An orbit data file. In this case, the orbit data provider is OrbitFileDataProvider.
The orbital elements, where the orbit data provider is OrbitalParametersProvider.

If the orbit is pre-sampled it comes from an orbit data file. In the Gaia Sky the orbits of all major planets are pre-sampled, as well as the orbit of Gaia. For instance, the orbit of Venus.

{
    "name" : "Venus orbit",
    "color" : [1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.55],
    "ct" : "Orbits",

    "parent" : "Sol",
    "impl" : "gaiasky.scenegraph.Orbit",
    "provider" : "gaiasky.data.orbit.OrbitFileDataProvider",

    "orbit" : {
        "source" : "data/orb.VENUS.dat",
    }
}

If you prefer to define the orbit using the orbital elements, you need to specify these parameters in the orbit object. For example, the orbit of Phobos.

{
    "name" : "Phobos orbit",
    "color" : [0.7, 0.7, 1.0, 0.4],
    "ct" : "Orbits",

    "parent" : "Mars",
    "impl" : "gaiasky.scenegraph.Orbit",
    "provider" : "gaiasky.data.orbit.OrbitalParametersProvider",

    "orbit" : {
        "period" : 0.31891023,
        "epoch" : 2455198,
        "semimajoraxis" : 9377.2,
        "eccentricity" : 0.0151,
        "inclination" : 1.082,
        "ascendingnode" : 16.946,
        "argofpericenter" : 157.116,
        "meananomaly" : 241.138
    }
}

Grids and other special objects

There are a last family of objects which do not fall in any of the previous categories. These are grids and other objects such as the Milky Way (inner and outer parts). These objects usually have a special implementation and specific parameters, so they are a good example of how to implement new objects.

{
    "name" : "Galactic grid",
    "color" : [0.3, 0.5, 1.0, 0.5],
    "size" : 1.4e12,
    "ct" : "Galactic",
    "transformName" : "equatorialToGalactic",

    "parent" : "Universe",
    "impl" : "gaiasky.scenegraph.Grid"
}

For example, the grids accept a parameter transformName, which specifies the geometric transform to use. In the case of the galactic grid, we need to use the equatorialToGalactic transform to have the grid correctly positioned in the celestial sphere.

Creating your own catalogue loaders

If you want to load data into Gaia Sky, changes are that the STIL data provider can already do it. It supports VOTable, FITS, ASCII, CSV, etc. and it loads the data making educated guesses on the UCDs (if present) or on the column names.

If you still need to create your own loader, keep reading.

In order to create a loader for your catalogue, one only needs to provide an implementation to the ISceneGraphLoader –here– interface.

public interface ISceneGraphLoader {
  public List<? extends SceneGraphNode> loadData() throws FileNotFoundException;
  public void initialize(String[] files) throws RuntimeException;
}

The main method to implement is List<? extends SceneGraphNode> loadData() –here–, which must return a list of elements that extend SceneGraphNode.

But how do we know which file to load? You need to create a catalog-*.json file, add your loader there and create the properties you desire. Usually, there is a property called files which contains a list of files to load. Once you’ve done that, implement the initialize(String[]) –here– method knowing that all the properties defined in the catalog-*.json file with your catalogue loader as a prefix will be passed in the Properties p object without prefix.

Also, you will need to connect this new catalog file with the Gaia Sky configuration so that it is loaded at startup. To do so, locate your global.properties file (usually under $GS_CONFIG, see folders) and add your new file to the property data.json.catalog.

Add your implementing jar file to the classpath (usually putting it in the lib/ folder should do the trick) and you are good to go.

Take a look at already implemented catalogue loaders such as the OctreeCatalogLoader –here– to see how it works.

Loading data using scripts

Data can also be loaded at any time from a Python script. See the scripting section for more info.