TY  - GEN
Y1  - 2024///
AV  - public
UR  - https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/34797/
CY  - Heidelberg
TI  - Visualization of Astrometric and Astrophysical Data
A1  - Sagristà Sellés, Antoni
ID  - heidok34797
N2  - Astronomy is as old as mankind. Its progress and evolution in history has been parallel to the very process of human development. The advent of modern physical sciences caused an exponential progress in astronomy and, by extension, astrophysics, which has seen amazing development over the twentieth century, and especially in the ?rst decades of the new millennium. In this work we ?rmly set one foot in astrophysics and the other in scientific visualization, while we develop and use the latter to respond to scientific research questions posed by the former. This thesis has been interdisciplinary since its very inception. It bases on scientific visualization and computer graphics and aims at providing and developing methods and techniques particularly designed to help analyze and understand astrophysical systems and processes. It is composed of two distinct parts:
In the ?rst part of this thesis, we borrow from the ?eld of vector ?eld topology, classically concerned with the non-inertial dynamics of static and time-dependent ?ows, and develop and extend it to enable the study of force-induced, inertial systems, like those governing most of our universe. We then focus on the various time dimensions ingrained in vector ?eld topology, and introduce a framework for its analysis and exploration based on novel derived aggregation ?elds that capture various properties of the underlying system, and present them in digestible representations in order to aid in the interpretation and analysis of the time domain. Finally, we address the very underlying structures that de?ne complex dynamical systems, and provide a quantitative approach for their extraction and
subsequent analysis.
The second part of this thesis concerns itself with the exploration and representation of very-large astrometric and astrophysical datasets. In this part, we base on computer graphics and visualization, and develop a technique to efficiently and interactively navigate through catalogs of billions of objects, introduce a method to e?ectively use ?oating-point arithmetic in the representation of the known universe without suffering from precision loss, propose a novel logarithmic function to enable limited-resolution depth buffers to function for astronomically large scenes, and present an integrated visualization of relativistic e?ects, including relativistic aberration due to the observer?s motion and gravitational waves.
ER  -