Firefly Tutorial (June 2020)

LSP Firefly (User Interface) Tutorial

The following describes some basic examples of using the Firefly User Interface of the LSST Science Platform to discover and access data from various sources.

To start, point your browser to: http://lsp.roe.ac.uk/portal/suit/

The first page that you should see is the "TAP Searches" page, which will be described below.

TAP Searches

TAP - Table Access Protocol - is the IVOA standard for querying source catalogue data. It uses ADQL, which is an IVOA-developed query language that adds some astronomy-specific features to the SQL92 standard, enabling astronomical source catalogues stored in a range of relational databases to be queried in the same way, provided that the developers of the TAP service sitting in front of the database have implemented a translation layer to convert ADQL into its native SQL dialect.

Fill out the first input "TAP Service" with a URL for the TAP service that you want to query. For this example let's use the TAP service running on the WFCAM Science Archive (WSA): its URL is http://tap.roe.ac.uk/wsa/
Once filled, hit "Enter" and the service should then fetch all the relevant metadata for that service, including Tables & Columns.

We can navigate through the drop-downs for this metadata to discover names and descriptions for the data available through this TAP Service.

The second input is the "Select Query Type" input, where you can either set constraints for a Single Table, or we can enter Freeform SQL.

For this example let's manually write a query, to access some data from the "UKIDSSDR9PLUS" table.

Click the "Adql" Radio button, after which you should see a metadata tree, and a text input box, where we can enter a query to access any of these tables. Enter the following query and hit the "Search" button on the bottom left of the screen:
select top 1000 * from UKIDSSDR9PLUS.lasSource where ra>180 and ra<230 and dec >0 order by ra

This should now open a new tab, where the results will be shown as a table, as well as a plot.
There are a number of options for further navigating through this data:

  • In the table you can go through each page using the arrows, filter columns using a keyword search, export the data etc.

  • In the plot view you can select points, zoom in and out, export the points, add new charts like Histograms and Heatmaps. These views are connected, so that selecting points in the plot will highlight the points in the Scatterplot.

External Images

If you click the "External Images" link, you will be taken to a form where you can select images through various sources. This includes selecting standalone Fits images, or using Hips Services to create a Hierarchical view of of an Image survey that you can pan through, and zoom in and out to different resolutions. For this example we can use a Hips Survey at ROE named "UHSDR1_PIX".

Hit the "Search" button, which should then open the Image viewer as another widget, alongside the Table and plot views from the previous step.

In this view you can pan though the survey, or use the options at the top of the widget to do various tasks including: Zoom in/out, Select an area, save view as image, manipulate the display and others.

Other Options

There are some other options available through the Firefly interface which won't be covered in this tutorial such as: Uploading a Table, using the "Legacy PDAC" interface, and accessing "External Catalogues", all of which are various ways of accessing data and visualizing them though Firefly.

If you require this document in an alternative format, please contact the LSST:UK Project Managers lusc_pm@mlist.is.ed.ac.uk or phone +44 131 651 3577