CITING SAOIMAGE DS9 ARCHIVE

The distributed binaries consist of a self-contained self-extracting archive and application, which provides an independent Tcl/Tk environment without installation. The current version of DS9 is composed of the Tk widgets created along with support from about 20 other open source products (including Tcl/Tk, AST, BLT, HCompress, HTMLWidget, plio, rics, tcllib, tclxml, tkcon, tkimg, tktable, wcssubs, xmlrpc, XPA, zip, zlib, and zvfs). However, all the visualization techniques come directly from SAOImage. DS9 inherited TNG's support of regions, XPA, external analysis support, and the general GUI. Basically, all the real work is done in C++. A number of Tk Canvas widgets in C++ were created to support all the functionality needed. The GUI is implemented as a very thin layer of Tk. Current funding is provided by the NASA High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Center and the Chandra X-ray Science Center.ĭS9 is a Tcl/Tk application. For lack of a name, the new project was referred to as DS9, the logical extension of the Star Trek series. This project was funded by the NASA Applied Information Systems Research Program, under the title 'Future Directions for Astronomical Image Display'. In 1998, while working with Eric, William Joye began a complete rewrite of TNG, based on the experience developed while supporting TNG. In particular, it utilized XPA, (X11 Public Access, also written by Eric) which allowed TNG to be scripted via a shell, or from other application. It explored new GUI interfaces and supported a new external analysis interface. TNG was based on IRAF's XIMTOOL graphics libraries and Tcl. In the mid 1990's, with the administrative support of Steve Murray, Eric Mandel developed SAOtng, or (SAOImage, The Next Generation), named after the Star Trek series. Since Mike's departure from SAO, SAOImage has been maintained by Jessica Mink. SAOImage was a brilliant program, implementing techniques in scientific visualization 20 years ago that are still being used by today's applications. In fact, it was one of the first X11 based applications publicly made available. SAOImage was first implemented in X10, then reimplemented in X11. The OPENapplication sets up the environment just as it is when a user double clicks. When opening MacOSX Aqua from the command line, it is better to use the OPENapplication as opposed to specifying the binary directly. In 1990, Mike Van Hilst, at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Center for Astrophysics, Harvard University, developed SAOImage. SAOImage DS9 cannot open files in the 'Flexible Image Transport System' format. It also incorporates the X Public Access (XPA) mechanism to allow external processes to access and control its data, GUI functions, and algorithms.Story of SAOImageDS9 The Story of SAOImageDS9: How DS9 got its name

GUI elements such as the coordinate display, panner, magnifier, horizontal and vertical graphs, button bar, and colorbar can be configured via menus or the command line.ĭS9 is a Tk/Tcl application which utilizes the SAOTk widget set. All versions and platforms support a consistent set of GUI and functional capabilities.ĭS9 supports advanced features such as multiple frame buffers, mosaic images, tiling, blinking, geometric markers, colormap manipulation, scaling, arbitrary zoom, rotation, pan, and a variety of coordinate systems.

CITING SAOIMAGE DS9 WINDOWS

Versions of DS9 currently exist for Sun Solaris, Sun Solaris64, Linux, Linu圆4, MacOSX Intel and PPC, Darwin Intel and PPC, and Windows XP. It requires no installation or support files. It provides for easy communication with external analysis tasks and is highly configurable and extensible.ĭS9 is a stand-alone application. DS9 supports FITS images and binary tables, multiple frame buffers, region manipulation, and many scale algorithms and colormaps. SAOImage DS9 is an astronomical imaging and data visualization application.

Citing saoimage ds9