Fv: The Interactive FITS File Editor

The latest version is 5.5.2, released April 2020


Fv is an easy to use graphical program for viewing and editing any FITS format image or table. The Fv software is small, completely self-contained and ready to run on
  • Linux
  • macOS
  • Windows PCs (Fv v5.3 only)
Fv can be used with the DS9 image display.

Download Fv now...

animation showing the power
	of fv: header keywords, table spreadsheets, histogram and scatter plots,
	images and contours


Fv also provides a portal into the new Hera data analysis service at the HEASARC:
  • Dozens of powerful utility program are available to manipulate local FITS file
    • Do general image arithetic using complex mathematical expressions
    • Sort, merge, join, or filter rows of a table
    • Compute statistics about images or table columns
    • Make ASCII listings of the contents of any image or table
  • The programs run the same as if they were installed locally but they actually execute on the Hera servers.
  • The input data files are transparently uploaded to the Hera servers where the program is executed, and any output FITS files and text output are transparently copied back to your machine after the program finishes.
  • Hera tasks may be executed from the command line or using the special GUI built into Fv.
  • For professional researchers, Hera provides the complete suite of data analysis programs from the FTOOLS, Chandra CIAO, and XMM SAS software packages.
Learn more about Hera...

Links to more Fv information:


The current fv development team is
  • William Pence: Project Scientist, author of cfitsio
  • Pan Chai: Project Engineer

Pages maintained by Bryan Irby
Send bug reports or feature requests via the FTOOLS help desk.

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Last modified: Monday, 13-Apr-2020 17:14:31 EDT