Lactea is an open-source, web-based implementation of a submitted paper to the EuroVis 2025 conference introducing a spectral visualization, multi-resolution technique for a large star catalog. This repository works with the European Space Agency (ESA)'s GAIA catalog, which contains the spectral information of almost 2 billion stars.

To cite the paper:

@article{alghamdi2025Lactea,
    title = {Lactea: Web-Based Spectrum-Preserving Multi-Resolution Visualization of the GAIA Star Catalog},
    author = {Alghamdi, Reem and Hadwiger, Markus and Reina, Guido and Jaspe-Villanueva, Alberto},
    journal = {Computer Graphics Forum (Proceedings of Eurographics Conference on Visualization 2025)},
    year = {2025},
    volume = {44},
    number = {3},
    pages = {to appear}
} 

For more information, please visit the GitHub Repository

Quick Overview of the funcitonalities

Key/Button	Functionaliy
Space	Change settings to replicate paper figures
G	Show/hide main GUI
M	Show/hide minimap
N	Show/hide node layout
I	Show/hide information
S	Show/hide spectrum of the selected point(s)
C	Show/hide colormap
O	overlay spectrum, colormap, information over visualization
P	change projection strategy
Canvas
Drag	Move around
Scroll	Zoom in/out
Right Click	Select point to view its spectrum
Shift + Drag	Select area to view spectra
Spectrum
Hover	Show information
Shift + Drag	Zoom into area
Right Click	Reset Zoom
Alt + Drag	Move Spectrum around
Colormap
Double Click	Add new color
Click	Change selected point color (from main GUI)
Drag	Change position
Right Click	Delete Point
Hover	Show information