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 v2). It is written entirely in Tcl/Tk (with several binary and script extensions).
- Version: 4.0b10 (01/2007)
- Download: http://hea-www.harvard.edu/RD/ds9/
- Debian package saods9 [L1 ]
Using DS9
- You will need some FITS images to use DS9
- FITS is the "Flexible Image Transport System", and is the standard image format used by astronomers [L2 ]
- There are many public repositories of astronomical images in FITS format: one is http://skyview.gsfc.nasa.gov/
- DS9 can be used as a graphical frontend for other image analysis/processing software: see http://hea-www.harvard.edu/RD/ds9/ lists IRAF [L3 ] [L4 ], CIAO [L5 ], SAS [L6 ] and fv [L7 ]. fv is another tool written in Tcl/Tk.
Discussion
- A talk by William Joye, October 2004 [L8 ] 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
Other Goodies provided with DS9 (Note that the License is GPL v2)
- patches for BLT on Mac OS X
- patches for Tcl/Tk on Cygwin
- SAOTk binary extension - used by DS9 for imaging - it provides custom item types for the canvas widget. SAOTk can be used without DS9 in custom data visualisation applications: see SAOTk for details.
- tkmpeg binary extension - MPEG 1 encoder. Used by DS9 to save a series of frames as an MPEG.
- checkdns binary extension - a DNS client (cf Tcllib's dns)
- iis binary extension - nothing to do with the Microsoft Web server called IIS, IIS is an image display protocol whose main use is allow connection of display software such as DS9 to an image processing package called IRAF [L9 ] (Image Reduction and Analysis Facility).
- tclxpa binary extension - 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. XPA is also available as a standalone package from [L10 ].
Name
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.
Category Application - Category Graphics - Category Visualization - Category (L)GPL Licensed