Aladin

Aladin: A feature-rich program capable of acquiring sky maps from specialized services to view and analyze them

Aladin is a comprehensive application you can use to retrieve sky maps, astronomical catalogs and photos to analyze distances, star properties and coordinates.

While Aladin is an intuitive piece of software, it lets you do many useful things related to the study of astronomy. For example, you can create cross references, link images to coordinates, draw shapes and contours and match object luminosity.

The tool can read astronomical surveys, photos, as well as superimpose data from astronomical catalogs. With Aladin, it is possible to acquire various types of data libraries and information sheets from VizieR, SkyBoT, Simbad databases and NED.

It also lets you retrieve astronomical images from various servers, including DSS, UKIDSS, SkyView+, VLA, SDSS and so on. Courtesy of the multi-view split screen option you can visualize multiple images at once, with the possibility to zoom in and out of them. The built-in analysis tools can be used for numerous purposes like drawing contours, associating photos to coordinates, measuring overplot photometry, calculating distances and much more.