Healpix

• Fast simulation and analysis of full-sky maps of CMB temperature and polarization anisotropy (sky maps preview) up to sub-arcminute angular resolution
• Filtering of sky maps with arbitrary circular window
• Constrained and non-Gaussian realization facilities
• Highly optimised Spherical Harmonics Transforms library (libsharp) used by all implementations for better performance
• Forward and backward scalar and spin-weighted Spherical Harmonics Transforms
• Programs to manage, modify and rotate spherical harmonic coefficients of arbitrary maps

• Pixelation of the sphere supported down to a pixel size of 0.4 mas (milli-arcseconds), corresponding to potentially 3.5 1018 pixels on the sphere
• Pixel queries in discs, triangles, polygons and strips
• Programs to search the maps for pixel neighbours and extrema of a random field
• Median filtering of sky maps
• Mask processing facilities
• Support for multi resolution maps (aka, Multi Order Coverage maps or MOC)

  3. General:

• Comprehensive documentation (PDF and HTML); web-based and email support
• Automated installation and build scripts
• Most critical routines are parallelized

  4. Visualization:

• Visualization facilities available in C++, Fortran 90, IDL, Java and Python
• Facilities to output HEALPix maps into Google Earth/Google Sky compliant images and into DomeMaster format used in planetariums.

  5. Input/Output:

• routines to manipulate and visualize the FITS files generally used for I/O