Blazars are celestial bodies of high interest to astronomers. In particular, through the analysis of photometric and polarimetric observations of blazars, astronomers aim to understand the physics of the blazar's relativistic jet. However, it is challenging to recognize correlations and time variations of the observed polarization, intensity, and color of the emitted light. In our prior study, we proposed TimeTubes to visualize a blazar dataset as a 3D volumetric tube. In this paper, we build primarily on the TimeTubes representation of blazar datasets to present a new visual analytics environment named TimeTubesX, into which we have integrated sophisticated feature and pattern detection techniques for effective location of observable and recurring time variation patterns in long-term, multi-dimensional datasets. Automatic feature extraction detects time intervals corresponding to well-known blazar behaviors. Dynamic visual querying allows users to search long-term observations for time intervals similar to a time interval of interest (query-by-example) or a sketch of temporal patterns (query-by-sketch). Users are also allowed to build up another visual query guided by the time interval of interest found in the previous process and refine the results. We demonstrate how TimeTubesX has been used successfully by domain experts for the detailed analysis of blazar datasets and report on the results.

Astronomers have been observing blazars to solve the mystery of the relativistic jet. A technique called TimeTubes uses a 3D volumetric tube to visualize the time-dependent multivariate observed datasets and allows astronomers to interactively analyze the dynamic behavior of and relationship among those variables. However, the observed datasets themselves exhibit uncertainty due to their errors and missing periods, whereas periods interpolated by TimeTubes result in a different type of uncertainty. In this paper, we present a technique for ameliorating such data- and mapping-inherent uncertainties: visual fusion of datasets for the same blazar from two different observatories. Visual data fusion with Time-Tubes enables astronomers to validate the datasets in a meticulous manner.