Functionality

Aipsview currently has the following functionality:

• Easy to use, intuitive graphical user interface (Motif based).

• Input of FITS images, optional compile time support of MIRIAD images and AIPS++ images (if compiled in the AIPS++ environment), including blanked pixels.

• Display of 2D images.

• Simultaneous display of images from multiple data sets.

• Display on TrueColor windows.

• Display of any orthogonal 2D slice from a 3D image cube (e.g., display of RA vs. DEC for a given velocity, display of RA vs. VELO for a fixed DEC, etc.), see Section 2.2.2.

• Zooming, see Section 2.3.3.

• Interactive display of data values, pixel values, and world coordinate values (e.g., RA, DEC) as pointer is moved around image, see Section 2.4.2.

• Subregion selection, with subregions being rectangular areas defined by mouse selection of opposite corners, see Section 2.4.3.

• Interactive vector (line drawing) plots of data value vs. coordinate value (e.g., for line profile plots or intensity vs. spatial position plots), see Section 2.4.4.

• Display of contours, both alone and overlaid on raster images, see Section 2.3.4. Users have control of the appearance of contours, see Section 2.3.2.

• Optional display of axes around images with coordinate annotation, see Section 2.3.4. Users have control of the content and placement of labels and overlaid markers for publication-quality PostScript output, see Section 2.3.2.

• PostScript printing (grayscale or color) of raster images (see Section 2.3.1) and vector (line drawing) plots, see Section 2.4.4.

• Movie or animation function for time-sequence display of third dimension of 3D images, see Section 3.1.1.

• Time synchronized movies of two (or more) data cubes of the same area of sky (i.e., the same velocity of each data cube is displayed as the two movies are run), see Section 3.1.2.

• Blink function for animation display of two (or more) single planes of different images, see Section 3.1.3.

• Synchronized picking, for simultaneous display of intensity values, profiles, or subregions in multiple images based on selection of positions in a single image, see Section 3.2.

• Complete colormap editor for manipulation of color look-up tables and creation of new tables. Interactive manipulation of zero point and contrast of color look-up table, using the mouse, see Section 3.3.

• Ability to save the state of aipsview in global and file-specific configuration files, see Section 3.4.

• Support for handling very large data sets by display of subsampled full images with reduced resolution and/or of subregions of full images with full resolution. Aipsview will use the full virtual memory available. For FITS data sets aipsview memory-maps a piece of the data set at a time thus limiting the amount of swap space needed, see Appendix A.3.

• Glish for communication with AIPS++, see Appendix A.5.