A prototype of ALADIN has been developed at the CDS, using some well defined test regions of the sky: the Large Magellanic Cloud and the Galactic anti-center. The corresponding images are stored on the ATG optical disk system (9 Giga bytes/disk) of the CDS.
For the LMC, the CAI-MAMA group digitized two ESO plates in two colors, and . Each image is made up of pixels coded on 16 bits.
It is currently possible to visualize the images of these two ESO plates of the LMC, and to overlay GSC stars and Simbad objects, using an interactive graphical user interface: GIFAD (Paillou and Ochsenbein 1992). The user can also overlay objects coming from his/her own data files.
This is currently used, at the Strasbourg Observatory, in a project of cross-identifications of ROSAT X-ray sources in the Large Magellanic Cloud.
Distribution of a functional version of ALADIN is foreseen for the end of 1995. Several milestones are defined: Southern hemisphere integrated in ALADIN for the end of 1993, Northern hemisphere integrated for the end of 1994, distribution of version 1.0 of the user interface for the end of 1995.