Description
I present the FITS Realtime Explorer of Low Latency in Every Dimension. This is a FITS viewer designed to display 3D data cubes using the popular "Blender" art package. It allows users to display their data volumetrically, as isosurfaces (surfaces of a constant data value), or more traditional channel maps (including with displacement so that the data is shown as a height map). Though primarily designed for quantitative analysis and rapid source finding, the multitude of visualisation techniques, along with the ability to animate the data and view it in virtual reality, makes this well-suited for public outreach. In this talk I will present some of the major features of the software, showing how these were not developed solely out of scientific need, but rather from artistic curiosity. I will explore how the motivation to explore data in different ways, to display the same information differently, led to scientifically robust tools with quantitative benefits for data analysis, and examine how a desire to create atheistically pleasing imagery resulted in a scientifically useful tool developed over more than a decade. Conversely, I will also address how the desire to explore new artistic styles required developing extensive Python code. This is an intersection of art and science which is unfamiliar to most artists and astronomers alike, but may be productive for both.
