User manual

(see the copyright). It has been translated in English, French, Italian, German, Persian,

Russian, Chinese…

Aladin is mainly used for :

 Visualizing and checking catalogues and images

 Searching and browsing available astronomical data

 Preparing observations

 Creating field charts

The Aladin software can be used directly in a Web page for dynamically visualizing

astronomical data into a simple navigator such as Internet Explorer or Firefox. Many

institutes are using this way for providing their own data to their users (NED, CADC,

MAST, ESAC, ESO..).

Aladin is developed by the Centre de Données astronomiques de Strasbourg (CDS). It is

compatible with most computer configurations including Windows, Linux and Mac. It

does not require significant resources unless it has to handle very large catalogues

(several hundreds of thousands of objects)

Created in 1999, Aladin is supporting emerging standards of the Virtual Observatory. It

is compliant with other visualization and analysis tools (IDL, VOPlot, TOPCAT,

Specview, Splat, VOSpec ...). All these key topics allow Aladin to be a powerful data

exploration and integration tool as well as a science enabler.

The Aladin Web site is : http://aladin.u-strasbg.fr.

2 Installation

The Aladin installation depends on your hardware configuration. In any case, it only

takes a few seconds.

Local installation

Aladin requires only a few megabytes disk space and 256 RAM megabytes is sufficient

for most jobs.

Under Windows

URL : http://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/java/Aladin.exe

Under Windows, the fastest and easiest way is to copy the file “Aladin.exe” in a folder, or

even directly on your desktop. That's all!

Under Mac

URL: http://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/java/Aladin.dmg