DS9: Astronomical Data Visualization Application

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

DS9 is the next version of the popular SAOtng display program. It is a Tk/Tcl application which utilizes the SAOTk widget set. It also incorporates the new X Public Access mechanism to allow external processes to access and control its data, GUI functions, and algorithms. DS9 supports all capabilities in the current  SAOtng, including direct display of FITS images and binary tables, multiple frame buffers, region/cursor manipulation, many scale algorithms and colormaps, and easy communication with external analysis tasks. It is highly configurable and extensible to meet the evolving needs of the astronomical community.

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 (including Image, Physical, Detector, and WCS). 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, and colorbar can be configured via menus or the command line.

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.

DS9 is a stand-alone application. It requires no installation or support files.
Now available version 1.8.4.

Binaries

Documentation

Source code

Return to The SAO/HEAD R&D Group Home Page