[daip] Re: ds9 and aips

[Eric Greisen]

Farhad Zadeh writes:

 > More and more people are using ds9 tool to look at
 > pictures, though aips display is still better for
 > making publishable quality images with coordinates.
 > I was wondering if there is a way that one could  upload an
 > aips image inside aips into ds9 from outside aips.
 > This would save me time to write an aips file into the
 > disk every-time
 > I want to use ds9. I am not sure how hard it would be to do this.
 > I assume it is harder to launch ds9 from inside aips but would work
 > a lot better if you know what I mean. It is a shame that
 > so many images I have inside aips have to be written into a
 > fits disk before I can use ds9 which is quite versatile for
 > X-ray, radio comparison.

An interesting thought, but almost impossible to implement.  AIPS uses
an internal binary format for images that is similar to FITS logically
but not similar in binary form.  I do not know what ds9 uses, but
would not be surprised if it reads FITS files natively (with CFITSIO
probably).  Therefore it needs us to turn the AIPS image into FITS format
anyway.  AIPS currently does not depend on any external packages and
we will probably keep it that way.  We may start using WCSLIB but will
provide our own copy of it with aips if we do.

Eric Greisen