Aladin is an interactive sky atlas allowing the user to visualize digitized astronomical images or full surveys, superimpose entries from astronomical catalogs or databases, and interactively access related data and information from the Simbad database, the VizieR service and other archives for all known astronomical objects in the field.

Aladin Desktop is a widely-used java tool capable of addressing challenges such as locating data of interest, accessing and exploring distributed datasets, visualizing multi-wavelength data. Compliance with existing or emerging VO standards, interconnection with other visualisation or analysis tools, ability to easily compare heterogeneous data are key topics allowing Aladin to be a powerful data exploration and integration tool as well as a science enabler. Aladin Desktop is based on Java techonology. It requires a classical installation on the user machine.

Main features:

• 20 000+ data collections(DSS, SDSS, PanSTARRS, Skymapper, Gaia, Simbad, NED, VizieR, ...);
• Zoom;
• Pan;
• Rotate;
• Overlays;
• Multi-views;
• Many projections (Sin, Tan, Aitoff, Mollweide, etc);
• Any coordinate systems (FK4, FK5, ICRS, GAL, SGAL, ECL);
• No image size limit;
• Million source overlays, Most of astronomical formats (images: HiPS, FITS, PDS, HEALPix map, JPEG, PNG;
• cubes (HiPS, FITS);
• tables: HiPS, FITS, VOTable, S-extractor, IPAC TBL, ASCII, etc;
• regions: XML, STC, DS9, IDL);
• Powerful tool boxes (images: color map, contours, crop, re-encode, color composition, pixel computation, resampling, astrometrical calibration, mosaic, photometric measurements, etc;
• Catalogs: filter, split, merge, x-match, scatter plot, etc);
• VO standards: JSAMP, TAP, CS, SSA, SIA, etc;
• Extendable: plugins, VOApp interface;
• Fully scriptable;
• Multi-language;