Starting GAIA

If you are working at a Starlink site then GAIA should automatically be available to you, provided that your account is set up to access Starlink software, which will usually be the case. No special quotas or privileges are required to run GAIA. However, it must be run on a workstation console or X-display capable of receiving X-output. In practice GAIA requires a colour display (strictly speaking it will run on a black and white one, but any image displayed is not visible).

GAIA is usually run from the Unix shell. Simply type:

% gaia &

(The `&' merely makes gaia run as a detached process so that you can, if you wish, continue to issue Unix commands from the command line.) After a few moments the main GAIA window will appear.

Now click on the File menu, which is the leftmost item in the menu-bar along the top of the window. Click on the Open... item. A file-picker window appears which allows you to choose the image file to be displayed. The final appearance should be similar to Figure . See the recipe in Section  for further details.

Alternatively, the required file can be specified on the command line when GAIA is started:

% gaia  file-name  &

for example:

% gaia ngc1275jkt.sdf &
% gaia ngc1275hri.fits &

The first example is a Starlink NDF file, the second a FITS file (see Section  for the data formats accessible to GAIA).

If you have already started GAIA and want to display a different image from the Unix command line then type:

% gaiadisp  file-name

It is also possible to plot an image in a given window by specifying its `clone number':

% gaiadisp  file-name clone-number

for example:

% gaiadisp ngc1275.sdf 2

The plot will be displayed in a window titled `GAIA::Skycat:file-name(2)'. If this window does not exist then it will be created.