[fitsbits] DS9 Version 2.0

[William Joye]

*******************************************************************************

		    DS9: astronomical image display
		 	 Public Release 2.0
		           1 December 2000

	        from the folks at the SAO/HEAD R&D Group
		     http://hea-www.harvard.edu/RD

Introduction
------------ 

We are pleased to announce the availability of the first public
release (version 2.0) of DS9, the new astronomical image display from
the SAO/HEAD R&D group.  We invite you to retrieve the software and
use it for your astronomical analysis (and other?) needs.

DS9 is the latest program in the popular SAOimage/SAOtng display
series.  It is a complete re-design and re-write of our past efforts,
based on 15 years of experience writing image display programs.  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 also supports advanced features such as mosaic images, true
PostScript printing, image tiling and blinking, colormap manipulation,
scaling, arbitrary zoom, rotation, pan, and a variety of coordinate
systems. It 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 that utilizes our new 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.
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.

We have been offering beta releases of DS9 to an ever-widening audience
for more than a year, and are now pleased to offer it for public release.
We would like to thank the many beta users who helped us work toward
this public release, both for their (occasional) bug reports and for
their (torrent of) thoughtful suggestions. Development of DS9 truly
has been a community effort and the program is much the better for it.

Platforms and Availability
--------------------------

DS9 is a stand-alone application that 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
supporting a consistent set of GUI and functional capabilities.)
DS9 executables for these platforms (as well as source code), are
available for download from our Web site:

	http://hea-www.harvard.edu/RD

Alternatively, DS9 can be retrieved directly via anonymous ftp from
sao-ftp.harvard.edu in the pub/rd directory.  Although source code is
available, we recommend using the binary distribution where possible.

Acknowledgments
----------------

Much of DS9 was developed at SAO by the HEAD Software R&D group, with
the significant help of collaborators and beta test users around the
world. We especially would like to acknowledge help from the following
collaborators:

	De Clarke         (UCO/Lick)
	Maureen Conroy    (SAO)
	Uwe Lammers       (ESA)
	Steve Murray      (SAO)
	Frank Primini     (SAO)
	John Roll         (SAO)
	Peter Teuben      (University of Maryland)

and code contributions from:

	D.S. Berry        (Starlink)
	L. Brown          (HEASARC)
	Mark Calabretta   (ATNF)
	Mike Fitzpatrick  (NOAO)
	Doug Mink         (SAO)
	Doug Tody         (NOAO)
	Steffen Traeger   (Siemens)
	P.T. Wallace      (Starlink)
	R.F. Warren-Smith (Starlink)
	Peter Wilson      (HEASARC)

The work at SAO was performed in large part under a grant from
NASA's Applied Information System Research Program (NAG5-9484), with
support from the (Chandra) High Resolution Camera (NAS8-38248) and the
Chandra X-ray Science Center (NAS8-39073).

SAORD Mailing List
-------------------

An saord mailing list (saord-announce) have been set up using Brent
Chapman's "Majordomo" mailing list manager.  Subscribers to this list
will receive periodic status reports, release notices, and other
useful information concerning SAORD software such as DS9.  If you wish
to become a subscriber, please send an e-mail message to:

	majordomo at head-cfa.harvard.edu	

The mail should contain the following command in the body of the
message:

	subscribe saord-announce

If either you or your mailer add a signature to your mail message,
please add the following command after the "subscribe" command(s):

	end

For more information (or to complain or encourage!)
---------------------------------------------------

Please send mail to: saord at cfa.harvard.edu.  We respond to questions,
bug reports, suggestions, gripes, and encouragement ...


						William Joye
						wjoye at cfa.harvard.edu

						Eric Mandel
						eric at cfa.harvard.edu

*******************************************************************************