The 35th annual conference on Astronomical Data Analysis Software & Systems 2025 in Görlitz, Germany

CARTA (Cube Analysis and Rendering Tool for Astronomy) is a cutting edge image visualization and analysis software designed to meet the demands of huge data from the ALMA, VLA, SKA pathfinders (MeerKAT and ASKAP), and the next generation telescopes (eg SKA and ngVLA), developed by a international collaboration from ASIAA, IDIA, NRAO, and Dept. of Physics University of Alberta.

Key features that make CARTA a powerful tool:
i) CARTA adopts a client-server architecture suitable for visualizing images with large file sizes (GB to TB) easily obtained from modern radio observations; heavy-lifting computation and data storage are handled by remote enterprise-class servers or clusters with high performance storage, while processed products are sent to clients only for visualization using client-side rendering techniques such as GPU-accelerated rendering.
ii) CARTA is designed to be memory-efficient when loading images. With a gigabyte of RAM, a 16k x 16k square pixel image can be loaded in seconds. For cubes, only the image size per channel matters.
iii) CARTA supports a wide range of astronomical data formats, including FITS, CASA, MIRIAD, and HDF5-IDIA. Optical, infrared, and x-ray images or cubes that follow FITS standard are also supported.
iv) CARTA offers various useful analysis tools, such as spatial and spectral profiles, region analysis, online data querying, moments and PV generator, etc.
v) CARTA provides flexible deployment options to serve from single-user usage with a PC to institution-wide multi-user deployment with user authentication and additional server-side features.

The latest release introduces multi-color blending, enabling pseudo-color composites from images with non-identical grids and sizes using flexible color-mapping configurations. A new channel-map view, powered by latency-hiding techniques, delivers efficient, interactive browsing across spectral channels, providing immediate insight into spatial structure and gas kinematics. Together, these capabilities make CARTA a robust platform for data-intensive science with current and next-generation telescopes.