Hyperatlas
An NVO interoperability project
The hyperatlas is an emerging standard for building atlases
of the sky. When multiple images have been rendered to the same page of the atlas,
their pixels line up exactly; images can be subtracted, for example in transient
search, or they can be jointly mined for faint sources (see for example
Szalay et al).
The paper Hyperatlas: A New Framework for Image Federation
(Williams, Djorgovski, Feldmann, Jacob) explains the concept in more detail, and
can be fount here.
See also the paper here.
The hyperatlas is a way to express and share coherent collections
of map projections from celestial sphere to plane. Each projection is called
a "page", and the colelction of pages is an "atlas". The
WCS formalism has
developed in the astronomical community, and is the basis of the projections
used in Hyperatlas.
The image below shows the point layout for the TM-5 atlas:
