Visualisation tools

During the course we will introduce several tools that are useful to visualise and explore astronomical data. Those tools cannot be run in the web-based system of your JupyterHub environment. Fortunately, the main tools we will use are available for a variety of platforms and operating systems and you should be able to use them in your local machine without major installation issues.

SAO Image DS9

DS9 is a powerful tool for displaying astronomical images (also data cubes and spectra) from FITS files. It also allows limited by convenient interactive analysis of the data.

DS9 can be downloaded for a range of platforms from its website. After you have downloaded the version for your operating system, go ahead an install it, following the website instructions if necessary. After opening it you should see a blank window

DS9

You can now open a FITS image (for example, try downloading this one) and you should get something like this

DS9 Eagle nebula

For more detail on how to use DS9 refer to its User Manual.

TOPCAT

TOPCAT is an application that allows to work with tabular data in many formats, as well as filtering, plotting, and cross-matching data. It can be installed in any system with a working Java Runtime Environment (JRE).

TOPCAT