Embedded Files
SAOImageDS9 version 8.8 is the latest release.
New Features of SAOImageDS9
Multicolor Frames
The headline feature for DS9 8.8 is multicolor frames. For two decades DS9 users have built three-color images by assigning datasets to the red, green, and blue channels of an RGB frame. The new multicolor frame type takes its place alongside the RGB, HLS, and HSV frames and removes the limit of three: a frame can now hold an arbitrary number of color layers, each with its own color, transparency, stacking order, and blend mode. For a JWST NIRCam field observed through six or eight filters, that is a qualitative change rather than a convenience. Each frame now also owns its own colorbar, which can sit on any side of the image, including the top or left.
The new Reveal Frames mode overlays two frames and wipes between them with a draggable slider.
Make Catalog
A region is not a just graphical overlay but instead is a portable analysis object. DS9 has long reported statistics for one selected region (sum, area, minimum, maximum, and now the centroid) through Region → Get Information and Analysis → Statistics. The new Analysis → Make Catalog does it for every region in the frame at once and presents the result as a catalog table, which can be sorted, filtered, plotted, histogrammed, and even cross-matched like any other catalog. Moreover, the catalog is live: move, rotate, add, or delete a region, or even smooth the image, and the catalog table updates.
3D Surface
The new 3D Surface option turns the pixels inside a 2D region into a 3D data cube in a separate frame, updating automatically as the region moves or as the scale, limits, or colormap change. At the same time there is a new way of rendering those cubes. Rendering a cube on a flat screen means reducing a whole line of 3D-pixels (voxels) to a single pixel, and until now DS9 offered two rules for doing so: take the brightest value along the line (MIP), or average them all (AIP). Both look through the data. The new FIP (First Intensity Projection) mode instead stops at the first real value it meets, skipping blanks and zeros, so the cube appears as a solid object seen from the outside, with everything behind the near surface hidden. Optional shading and lighting complete the effect.
Partial Healpix, MOC, and Bookmarks
Bookmarks (press m or go to Zoom -> Bookmarks) store an image position together with its zoom, rotation, orientation, and data-cube slice, so a point of interest can be returned to instantly. Healpix image support has been extended to support Partial Healpix image format and Multi-Order Coverage (MOC) maps.
... and much, much, more!
PDF Support! Save images and plots directly to PDF.
New movie "script" option allows ds9 to run a series of commands, adding frames to a GIF or MPEG movie.
Virtual Observatory (VO) Simple Image Access (SIA) integration.
Composite regions can now be identified as Union or Intersection with optional hatching to visualize area.
New full screen keyboard shortcuts. New Shift + Arrow to pan full screen.
Regions can now be saved as a Pixel Mask showing which pixels are inside each region.
Polygon vertices can now be edited directly.
Re-order frames by dragging them into different locations.
Change region, grid, and contour dashes
Updated easy-access catalog and image servers
User contributed updated for Astropy/LSST compressed images.
See the complete Release Notes
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