This page assumes you are working inside a notebook or console in the LSST Science Platform. To use Firefly elsewhere, see the page on standalone use.

Defining Displays in the LSST Science Platform

You must have a viewer tab or window open before sending commands to render images, tables or charts.

Defining a Display with default settings

To initialize a Firefly display, define a Display object with the lsst.afw.display interface.

import lsst.afw.display as afwDisplay
afwDisplay.setDefaultBackend('firefly')
display1 = afwDisplay.Display(frame=1)

A Firefly tab opens showing a toolbar at the top, and “Firefly Ready” in large letters in the center. You can drag the tab to the right side of your Jupyterlab session to allow you to see notebooks and the Firefly display side-by-side.

Defining subsequent displays

You can create additional Display objects by specifying a different value of the frame parameter. The subsequent displays will not open a tab; they will display to the same one created

Making a display tab reopen after closing it

If you have closed your Firefly tab, you can bring it back with

display1.show()

Reinitializing a display tab

You can reinitialize a Firefly viewer tab with

display1.clearViewer()

This command is specific to the Firefly backend of the afwDisplay framework.

Defining a Display to open a browser tab

The first time that a Display object is instantiated in your Python or notebook session, you can specify that a browser tab be opened. You will need to allow pop-ups for the science platform site.

import lsst.afw.display as afwDisplay
afwDisplay.setDefaultBackend('firefly')
display1 = afwDisplay.Display(frame=1)

Authorizing a Display

When working inside the LSST Science Platform with default settings, authorization of the connection to the Firefly server will be handled automatically. If you encounter a need to pass a token for authorization, you can pass it to the first Display instance you create, with the token= keyword parameter.

Embedding the Firefly viewer in a notebook

The Firefly tab or browser tab options are the recommended ways to bring up the Firefly viewer. That said, you can embed the Firefly viewer in the output of a notebook cell.

Using the SlateWidget

from ipywidgets import Layout
from jupyter_firefly_extensions import SlateWidget
slate= SlateWidget(layout=Layout(width='1100px', height='700px'))
slate._render_tree_id = display1.getClient().render_tree_id
slate

The SlateWidget appears in the output part of the cell and is ready to receive display commands from display1.

Using an IFrame

from IPython.display import IFrame
IFrame(display1.getClient().get_firefly_url(), 1100, 700)

The Firefly viewer appears in the output part of the cell.