Visualizing Astronomical Dendrograms#

You can use Glue to visualize dendrograms created by the astrodendro package.

Enabling the viewer#

The dendrogram viewer will be automatically available if the astrodendro package is installed. To install it, simply use:

pip install astrodendro

Building a dendrogram#

The details of constructing dendrograms for astronomical images is beyond the scope of this document – see https://dendrograms.readthedocs.io/ for more information. The following snippet builds a dendrogram from the W5 image used in the tutorial:

from astropy.io import fits
from astrodendro import Dendrogram

data = fits.getdata('W5.fits')
dg = Dendrogram.compute(data, min_value=500, min_npix=50)
dg.save_to('w5_dendro.fits')

Next, load this file into Glue, choosing “Dendrogram” as a file type. You can now visualize the W5 dendrogram alongside its image:

../_images/dendro.png

Linking to Catalog Properties#

If you have used astrodendro to compute a catalog of structure properties, you can visualize that in Glue as well. The best way to do this is to save the catalog as a table, load it into Glue, and merge it with the dendrogram dataset. This will supplement the dendrogram with the additional catalog-derived properties.