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ESASky is a science-driven discovery portal to explore the multi-wavelength sky and visualize and access multiple astronomical archive holdings. The tool is a web application that requires no prior knowledge of any of the missions involved and gives users world-wide simplified access to the highest-level science data products from multiple astronomical space-based astronomy missions plus a number of ESA source catalogs. The first public release of ESASky features interfaces for the visualization of the sky in multiple wavelengths, the visualization of query results summaries, and the visualization of observations and catalog sources for single and multiple targets. This paper describes these features within ESASky, developed to address use cases from the scientific community. The decisions regarding the visualization of large amounts of data and the technologies used were made to maximize the responsiveness of the application and to keep the tool as useful and intuitive as possible.

Astronomical data does not always use Cartesian coordinates. Both all-sky observational data and simulations of rotationally symmetric systems, such as accretion and protoplanetary disks, may use spherical polar or other coordinate systems. Standard displays rely on Cartesian coordinates, but converting non-Cartesian data into Cartesian format causes distortion of the data and loss of detail. Here, I  demonstrate a method using standard techniques from computer graphics that avoids these problems with three-dimensional data in arbitrary coordinate systems. The method adds minimum computational cost to the display process and is suitable for both realtime, interactive content, and producing fixed rendered images and videos. Proof-of-concept code is provided which works for data in spherical polar coordinates.