The ever-growing datasets in observational astronomy have challengedscientists in many aspects, including an efficient and interactive dataexploration and visualization. Many tools have been developed to confront thischallenge. However, they usually focus on displaying the actual images or focuson visualizing patterns within catalogs in a predefined way. In this paper weintroduce Vizic, a Python visualization library that builds the connectionbetween images and catalogs through an interactive map of the sky region. Vizicvisualizes catalog data over a custom background canvas using the shape, sizeand orientation of each object in the catalog. The displayed objects in the mapare highly interactive and customizable comparing to those in the images. Theseobjects can be filtered by or colored by their properties, such as redshift andmagnitude. They also can be sub-selected using a lasso-like tool for furtheranalysis using standard Python functions from inside a Jupyter notebook.Furthermore, Vizic allows custom overlays to be appended dynamically on top ofthe sky map. We have initially implemented several overlays, namely, Voronoi,Delaunay, Minimum Spanning Tree and HEALPix grid layers, which are helpful forvisualizing large-scale structure. All these overlays can be generated, addedor removed interactively with one line of code. The catalog data is stored in anon-relational database, and the interfaces were developed in JavaScript andPython to work within Jupyter Notebook, which allows to create custom widgets,user generated scripts to analyze and plot the data selected/displayed in theinteractive map. This unique design makes Vizic a very powerful and flexibleinteractive analysis tool. Vizic can be adopted in variety of exercises, forexample, data inspection, clustering analysis, galaxy alignment studies,outlier identification or simply large-scale visualizations.
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