I was recently at the Gaia Data Release meeting at ESAC, and a demo of a catalog visualization tool called vaex (http://vaex.astro.rug.nl/) caught my eye there.
This is a fast visualizer of catalog data. The claim is it can visualize (e.g. footprints, CMDs) a ~billion rows in a second on a not too beefy machine. It’s written in pure Python, can output to bqplot or bokeh (so it integrates well with IPython notebooks), and has a native QT interface as well. It did a wonderful job on Gaia catalog data.
My initial thought was that this could be interesting for initially enabling some of our QA as well (and therefore a ping to @RHL, @connolly, @ivezic, @gpdf, et al.). The author – Maarten Breddels – seems very open and interested in feedback & collaboration with potential downstream users. It may be good to have him give a remote tech talk.
n.b.: It operates in a similar problem space as Datashader (http://datashader.readthedocs.io/en/latest/).