Introduction ============ The mission of CARTA -------------------- CARTA is the *Cube Analysis and Rendering Tool for Astronomy*, a new image visualization and analysis tool designed for the ALMA, the VLA, and the SKA pathfinders - MeerKAT and ASKAP. As the image size increases dramatically with modern telescopes in recent years, viewing an image with a local CPU-based image viewer or with a remote CPU-based image viewer via the ssh protocol plus X11 tunneling or the VNC becomes much less efficient. The mission of CARTA is to provide usability and scalability for the future by utilizing modern web technologies and computing parallelization. Client-Server architecture -------------------------- CARTA uses a client-server architecture which is suitable for visualizing images with large file sizes (GB to TB) easily obtained from ALMA, VLA, or SKA pathfinders (MeerKAT and ASKAP) observations. It is practically difficult to process such a huge file with a personal computer or a laptop. By using a client-server architecture, computation and data storage can be handled by remote enterprise-class servers or clusters with high computing power and high performance storage, while processed products are sent to clients only for visualization with modern web technologies, such as GPU-accelerated rendering. This architecture also enables users to visualize images from the ALMA and the VLA science archives by using CARTA as an interface. .. raw:: html Codebase and releases --------------------- CARTA is an open-source project. Its source code is publicly available at https://github.com/CARTAvis. CARTA has two deployment modes: "Site Deployment Mode" (SDM) and "User Deployment Mode" (UDM). The former is intended for hosting multiple users with an enterprise-class server, while the later is intended for single-user usage with a personal computer, a laptop, or a remote server. Installation guides for the "Site Deployment Mode" and the "User Deployment Mode" are provided in the section :ref:`installation_configuration`. Please contact the `CARTA Helpdesk `_ (support@carta.freshdesk.com) if there is a problem. Beside the annual stable release (the current stable release is v3.0.0), there are beta releases within the one year development cycle. With the beta releases, you can try new features and provide your feedback to the development team for improving the next stable release. Please visit the CARTA homepage (https://cartavis.org) to obtain the latest beta and stable releases. Getting help ------------ The CARTA development team welcomes any suggestion, feature request, or bug report, to make CARTA better via * `CARTA Helpdesk `_ (support@carta.freshdesk.com) * `Github Issue `_ (https://github.com/CARTAvis/carta/issues) Contributors ------------ The development of the CARTA project is a joint effort from (in alphabetical order): * `Academia Sinica, Institute of Astronomy and Astrophysics (ASIAA) `_ * `Inter-university Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy (IDIA) `_ * `National Radio Astronomy Observatory (NRAO) `_ * `Department of Physics, University of Alberta `_ .. raw:: html Software citation ----------------- Please use the following DOI as a citation when using CARTA for publications. .. image:: https://zenodo.org/badge/DOI/10.5281/zenodo.3377984.svg :target: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3377984 The bibtex is .. code-block:: bibtex @software{angus_comrie_2018_3377984, author = {Angus Comrie and Kuo-Song Wang and Shou-Chieh Hsu and Anthony Moraghan and Pamela Harris and Qi Pang and Adrianna Pińska and Cheng-Chin Chiang and Rob Simmonds and Tien-Hao Chang and Yu-Hsuan Hwang and Hengtai Jan and Ming-Yi Lin}, title = {{CARTA: The Cube Analysis and Rendering Tool for Astronomy}}, month = dec, year = 2018, publisher = {Zenodo}, doi = {10.5281/zenodo.3377984}, url = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3377984} } You may also refer to https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020zndo...3377984C/abstract. Acknowledgement --------------- ASIAA CASA Development Center (ACDC) acknowledges the grant from the Ministry of Science and Technology of Taiwan for the ALMA-NA collaboration. The Inter-University Institute for Data Intensive Astronomy is a partnership of three South African universities: the University of Cape Town, the University of the Western Cape and the University of Pretoria. The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc. The Department of Physics at the University of Alberta has contributed to the CARTA project thanks to support from the National Radio Astronomy Observatory under an ALMA Development Project and from the Canada Foundation for Innovation as part of the Canadian Initiative for Radio Astronomy Data Analysis (CIRADA). CARTA is mainly built in C++, TypeScript, and JavaScript, and with the following third-party libraries: * AST: http://starlink.eao.hawaii.edu/starlink/AST * Blueprint: https://blueprintjs.com * casacore: https://casacore.github.io * CASA source code: https://casa.nrao.edu/index.shtml * Chart.js: https://www.chartjs.org * Electron: https://electronjs.org * GoldenLayout: https://golden-layout.com * GoogleTest: https://github.com/google/googletest * GSL: https://www.gnu.org/software/gsl/ * MobX: https://mobx.js.org * MongoDB: https://www.mongodb.com * node.js: https://nodejs.org * Plotly: https://plotly.com * Protocol buffers: https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers * Pugixml: https://pugixml.org * React: https://reactjs.org * spdlog: https://github.com/gabime/spdlog * sse2neon: https://github.com/DLTcollab/sse2neon * uWebsockets: https://github.com/uNetworking/uWebSockets * WebAssembly: https://webassembly.org The source code of CARTA is hosted on `Github `_. The CARTA development team is grateful to David Berry for consultation of the AST library and to Kumar Golap for consultation of the casacore library. Copyright and License --------------------- Copyright (C) 2018-2022 ASIAA, IDIA, NRAO, and Department of Physics, University of Alberta. This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the `GNU General Public License version 3 `_ as published by the Free Software Foundation.