SAOImage DS9 , a Tcl/Tk program that uses the SAOTk widget set, is an astronomical imaging and data visualization application. DS9 supports FITS images and binary tables, multiple frame buffers, region manipulation, and many scale algorithms and colormaps. It provides for easy communication with external analysis tasks and is highly configurable and extensible via XPA and SAMP.
Attributes
- current version
- 7.3.1
- release time
- 2014-10-07
- license
- GPL v3
Download
- SAOImage DS9
- main download site
- saods9
- Debian package
Description
SAOImage DS9 is a data visualization, analysis and imaging application used by professional astronomers. It is actively developed at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and is released under an open-source licence (GPL v3). It is written entirely in Tcl/Tk (with several binary and script extensions).
The Development of SAOImage DS9 , William Joye, Eric Mandel, 2004-10-27, gives an interesting outline of the problems of developing and maintaining scientific software
Note the commitment to Tcl/Tk and to open software development.
Also note the size of the datasets - typically hundreds of Mb for a single observation, but 19Gb for "megasec" exposures from the Chandra X-ray satellite
DS9 also stands for Deep Space 9. The High Energy Astrophysics Division of SAO has a preoccupation with things Star Trek. Its second generation image display was named TNG and the third is DS9.
Usage
You will need some FITS images to use DS9.
DS9 can be used as a graphical frontend for other image analysis/processing software: see http://ds9.si.edu lists IRAF [L1 ] [L2 ], CIAO [L3 ], SAS [L4 ] and fv [L5 ]. fv is another tool written in Tcl/Tk.
Other Goodies provided with SAOImage DS9
TkBLT 3.0: derived version of BLT, for Tcl/Tk 8.6, TEA compatible, full support for MacOSX and Windows. (original BLT license)
TkMPEG 1.0: TEA compatible, MPEG 1 encoder. (GPL v2)
TclCheckDNS 1.0: TEA compatible, a DNS client. (GPL v3)
TclXPA 2.1.14: XPA is messaging system that provides a unified communication system between different kinds of Unix programs, including X programs, Tcl/Tk programs, and shell programs. It uses TCP as its transport layer. (LGPL)
Misc
AM 2008-03-03: Not sure if this has anything to do with the above software, but the link that Colin McCormack posted in the tkchat is too nice to let go: [L6 ] (404).
Reference
The Development of SAOImage DS9 , William Joye, Eric Mandel, 2004-10-27:
The Story of SAOImage DS9: How DS9 got its name