SAOImage DS9: Astronomical Data Visualization Application

Brought to you by the SAO/HEAD R&D Group.

SAOImage DS9 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.

DS9 is a stand-alone application. It requires no installation or support files. Versions of DS9 currently exist for Sun Solaris, Linux, LinuxPPC, SGI, DEC Alpha, and Windows 95/98/NT/2000. All versions and platforms support a consistent set of GUI and functional capabilities.

DS9 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. DS9 also supports FTP and HTTP access.

The GUI for DS9 is user-configurable. 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.

DS9 is a Tk/Tcl application which utilizes the SAOTk widget set. It also incorporates the new X Public Access (XPA) mechanism to allow external processes to access and control its data, GUI functions, and algorithms.

One exciting new feature of DS9 is the ability to display multiple images in tile mode, where each image is scaled, oriented, and rotated to match WCS parameters. By locking cross-hairs, features among these images are easily compared.

Please see Release Notes for the latest enhancements and bug fixes.

If you encounter any problems, or have any suggestions, please contact us: saord@cfa.harvard.edu.

DS9 Binaries

Version 2.0
  • Solaris
  • Linux
  • LinuxPPC
  • SGI
  • Alpha OSF1
  • HP-UX
  • Windows 95/98/NT/2000
  • Version 1.9.8
  • Solaris
  • Linux
  • LinuxPPC
  • SGI
  • Alpha OSF1
  • HP-UX
  • XPA Binaries

  • Solaris
  • Linux
  • LinuxPPC
  • SGI
  • Alpha OSF1
  • HP-UX
  • Windows 95/98/NT/2000
  • Documentation

    Source code

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