fv: FITS Viewer and Editor

New features since V3.1 include:

• New function buttons have been added to the File Summary window to provide short cuts to common operations:

          - 'Hist' - displays a histogram image of 1 or 2 columns in a table 
          - 'Plot' - plots table columns 
          - 'Table All' and 'Table Select'
                   - The first button displays all the columns in a table, whereas the 
                     second button allows the user to select which columns to display.  

• Vectors or images contained within a single binary table cell may be plotted.
• When displaying Hierarchical grouping tables, a new 'OPEN' button is available at the beginning of each row which can be used to open the corresponding group member file.
• Can display and edit images that are compressed with the new FITS 'Tile Compression' algorithm.

New features since v3.0 include:

• Hundreds of tables available in VizieR can be queried to retrieve objects near a given position
• Column histogram tool can be limited to a specified row range
• New tool for editing the name, units and display format of columns
• 'Export as text' options can print row numbers, and print a user-specified character string between each columns value
• Double Right-clicking inside a pow graph redraws the graph with the default 1:1 zoom factor
• If an HDU contains a 1-D image, the 'PLOT' button on the summary window plots the pixel value vs. pixel coordinate instead of displaying a long, thin image
• The Zoom/in Zoom/out and replot buttons have been moved from the POW canvas and up into the menu bar
• Integer columns with the TSCAL and TZERO keywords are treated as doubles to prevent data truncation
• Rows of a vector table, either fixed or variable length, can be plotted

New features since v2.6 include:

• Search online SkyView database for images or objects located in a given region of the sky
• Execute an Ftool from within fv (Unix only)
• Plot vector columns and subsets of rows
• Smooth image extensions with a boxcar filter
• Symlinks to files supported
• Copy/Paste works in all table views
• More scripting commands
• New image analysis tools: Ruler (measure distances in an image), Profile (plot a cross-section of an image), Probe (calculate flux and centroid data of image region)
• New DS9 region files supported

New features since v2.5 include:

• Ported to MacOS
• Improved window management and improved design of some windows
• Replaced Options menu with a Preferences window which brings together and categorizes all of fv's user-controlled options
• New Auto-Plot preference
• Can turn off the Desktop Manager
• Expanded scripting capabilities via XPA mechanism
• File Selection window shows file sizes and modification dates
• POW's information/scope windows can be positioned on any side of the window or turned off altogether
• New Histogram Equalization color table for images
• New Text Label handling on graphs
• Full font control over graph labels

A FITS file editor developed at the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC) at NASA/ GSFC

Project Scientist:

Dr. William D. Pence (pence@tetra.gsfc.nasa.gov)

Previous Project Engineers (Raytheon/ITSS/Emergent):

Dr. Peter Wilson (pwilson@milkyway.gsfc.nasa.gov)

Dr. Ning Gan (ngan@milkyway.gsfc.nasa.gov)

Project Engineers (SSAI):

Pan Chai(chai@milkyway.gsfc.nasa.gov)

Original author: Jianjun Xu (jxu@oao.com)

Contributors: Dr. Lawrence Brown

To learn of new releases and bug fixes, visit the fv web page at

    http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/ftools/fv