All Other: SAOImage DS9

5.0 FREE Professional Imaging Software for use by everyone!

Professional Quality; Versatile with lots of features; FREE

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Are you looking for an astronomical imaging and visualization application?
Do you want to use something professional?
Looking for something that will run on multiple platforms and has a consistent interface?

Then give SAOImage DS9 a try!

The SAO in the name comes from its creator, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA.

SAOImage DS9 is an astronomical imaging and data visualization application that supports FITS images and binary tables, multiple frame buffers, region manipulation, and many scale algorithms and color maps. It also provides for easy communication with external analysis tasks and is highly configurable and extensible.

DS9 is a stand-alone application that requires no installation or support files. Versions of DS9 currently exist for Sun Solaris, Sun Solaris64, Linux, LinuxPPC, Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista, and MacOSX (darwin). All versions and platforms support a consistent set of GUI and functional capabilities.

The GUI for DS9 is user configurable and 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.

The software 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. It also supports FTP and HTTP access.

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

New releases are made available 4 times a year, and best of all, it's FREE! I have used DS9 for a number of years now and highly recommend it!