Image display capabilities

GAIA provides the following normal ``image display tool'' features:

• Display of images in FITS and Starlink NDF formats (this also means that it will display many other data formats using the on-the-fly data conversion ability of the NDF library, most notably the IRAF data format).

• Panning, zooming, data range and colour table manipulations.

• Continuous display of the cursor position and the image data value.

• Display of many images (clones), each in its own window.

• Coloured annotation, using text and line graphics (boxes, circles, polygons, lines with arrowheads, ellipses ...).

• Printing of the displayed image and annotations (annotations are drawn using printer resolution, i.e. not a screen dump) to a postscript file.

• Real time pixel value table. A table displaying the data values and simple statistics of a region about the cursor can be displayed.

• Display of image planes and spectra from data cubes. Using this you can step along an axis and display the image formed by the other two axes. You can also combine a range of image planes or do the stepping using a timed animation. The displayed images created by this tool can be analysed in the image-analysis toolboxes. A spectrum from the hidden dimension of the cube can be displayed and updated interactively and even sent to the Starlink SPLAT-VO program for analysis and additional inspection. Finally the spectral coordinates can be interactively transformed between various wavelength, frequency, energy and velocity systems.

• Selection of 2D or 3D regions using an integer mask. If you have a mask that segments your image into regions based on some integer value you can view only those parts of your image that correspond to some given values. Such masks are produced by the EXTRACTOR/SExtractor and CUPID applications.