SAOImage DS9

SAOImage DS9 is an advanced software application specialized in opening and displaying the content of FITS images which include astronomical data. It offers support for binary tables, region manipulation, multiple frame buffers, scaling algorithms, and colormaps.
The utility can also be controlled externally, more specifically its data, GUI functions, and algorithms, using the XPA mechanism which provides communication between SAOImage DS9 and other Unix programs, including X tools, Perl, S-Lang, and Tcl/Tk.

Portable running mode

You can keep SAOImage DS9 stored on pen drives or other portable devices. Plus, you can run it on the target PC directly from the portable storage device. Gaining access to the GUI requires only double-clicking on the executable file.

Interacting with the GUI

The program reveals a well-structured suite of features. However, it comes packed with a comprehensive set of parameters so you need to take some extra time to discover how they work. A help manual is also available in case you want to find you more details about the configuration settings.
You can import FITS files, save any modifications made to the original item to a new FITS file, check out header information, and print data.

Editing and viewing features

SAOImage DS9 gives you the possibility to show or hide a crosshair, make use of a colorbar in order to alter the colors displayed in the FITS photo, as well as pan, zoom, and rotate the picture to different angles. What’s more, you are allowed to crop photos and examine an image in detail.
When it comes to viewing functions, you can hide or show the panel with information about the file, object, value, and frame, display a magnifier, as well as reveal a graphical and horizontal graph.
What’s more, the application comes bundled with several advanced features, such as multiple frame buffers, mosaic images, tiling, blinking, geometric markers, arbitrary zooming mode, and several coordinate systems, including Image, Physical, Detector, and WCS. Plus, it allows FTP and HTTP access.
Other notable options worth being mentioned enable you to make use of regions for marking particular areas of an image for further analysis, create and overlay coordinate grids as an overlay on an image, load, display, filter, and save catalogs (you can use both local and online catalogs), and have user-defined analysis commands associated with each file type known to SAOImage DS9.

Extra options included in the package

You can back up the information to a file on your computer so you can quickly restore it, export the photo to TIFF, GIF, PNG, JPEG, or other file formats, generate movies (MPG), customize the appearance and behavior of the GUI, load and view data cubes in multiple dimensions (3D frames), create and display contours as an overlay on an image, as well as create an image from FITS Bin Table by specifying a binning factor, binning buffer, and binning function.
Tests have shown that SAOImage DS9 carries out tasks quickly and provides very good output quality. It eats up a moderate amount of CPU and memory resources.

Final remarks

The bottom line is that SAOImage DS9 gathers a comprehensive suite of features under its hood for helping you process and analyze FITS data, and is suitable especially for professional users.