[fitsbits] FV 3.0 Release Announcement

[William Pence]

FV 3.0 Release Announcement

Version 3.0 of the fv software tool for viewing and editing any FITS format
image or table is now available.  Fv is available either in source or 
executable form.  Easy to install executable distributions are currently 
available for Solaris, OSF, and Linux (x86).  Versions for Mac OS, and
Windows (95/98/NT) platforms are in preparation and should be available
within a couple weeks. The source distribution -- intended only for Unix
platforms -- ships with everything needed to build fv and the associated
POW image display tool.

Fv may be obtained from the HEASARC (High Energy Astrophysics Science
Archive Research Center) at:

              http://fv.gsfc.nasa.gov

The major new features in this release of fv are:

   * The SkyView online database of sky surveys and astronomical 
     catalogs can be queried to download images and tables of objects in
     any region of the sky.  The images can be displayed with overlays
     of the object positions. 

   * Image data can be smoothed using a boxcar filter. 

   * The region file editor now supports the formats where the position
     and size of the regions are give in WCS units instead of image pixel
     units.

   * A new interactive Ruler tool measures the distance between any two
     points in an image.

   * A new interactive image Probe tool measures the flux and intensity
     centroid within a user-selected region of an image.

   * A new interactive Profile tool plots the intensity cross-section
     between any 2 points in an image. 

In addition, dozens of other smaller enhancements have been made to fv and
POW.

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The fv development team currently consists of:

    William Pence:  Project Scientist
    Peter Wilson:   Tcl/Tk programmer, fv/POW programmer
    Ning Gan:       Tcl/Tk programmer, fv/POW programmer

fv and fitsTcl were originally written by Jianjun Xu.
POW was originally written by Lawrence Brown.
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