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Univiewer is a visualisation program for HEALPix maps. It is written in C++ and uses OpenGL and the wxWidgets library for cross-platform portability. Using it you can:
- Rotate and zoom maps on the sphere in 3D
- Create high-resolution views of square patches of the map
- Change maximum and minimum values of the colourmap interactively
- Calculate the power spectrum of the full-sky map or a patch
- Display any column of a HEALPix map FITS file on the sphere
Since Univiewer uses OpenGL for 3D graphics, its performance is dependent your video card. It has been tested successfully on computers with as little as 8Mb video memory, but it is recommended to have at least 32Mb to get good performance.
In the 3D view, a HEALPix map is projected onto a ECP pixelation to create a texture which is wrapped around the sphere. In calculating the power spectrum, the spherical harmonic transforms are computed using the same ECP pixelation. This inevitably leads to some discrepancies at small scales due to repixelation effects, but they are reasonably small.
The Planck Sky Model (PSM) is a global representation of the multi-component sky at frequencies ranging from a few GHz to a few THz. It summarizes in a synthetic way as much of our present knowledge as possible of the GHz sky. PSM is a complete and versatile set of programs and data that can be used for the simulation or the prediction of sky emission in the frequency range of typical CMB experiments, and in particular of the Planck sky mission. It was originally developed as part of the activities of Planck component separation Working Group (or "Working Group 2" - WG2), and of the ADAMIS team at APC.
PSM gives users the opportunity to investigate the model in some depth: look at its parameters, visualize its predictions for all individual components in various formats, simulate sky emission compatible with a given parameter set, and observe the modeled sky with a synthetic instrument. In particular, it makes possible the simulation of sky emission maps as could be plausibly observed by Planck or other CMB experiments that can be used as inputs for the development and testing of data processing and analysis techniques.