GAIA release Winter 2002

GAIA is an image display and analysis tool. It provides the usual facilities of image display tools, plus more astronomically useful ones such as aperture & optimal photometry, contouring, source detection, surface photometry, arbitrary region analysis, celestial coordinate readout, calibration and modification, grid overlays, blink comparison, defect patching and the ability to query on-line (WWW) catalogues.

GAIA is a derivative of the Skycat catalogue and image display tool, developed as part of the VLT project at ESO.

GAIA developments released this year include the addition of three new "toolboxes". One to display and manipulate polarization maps, one to very flexibly record and identify positions and one to display the mean profiles in a rectangular region.

A further major change was the addition of support for displaying multiple extension FITS files (MEFs). It is now possible to examine images and catalogues stored in these files.

Changes made in this release (a minor one) include:

• New X_PIXEL and Y_PIXEL parameters have been added to object detection toolbox (these report pixel coordinates, i.e. include any origin information).
• Non-transient pop-up windows that grabbed the focus during their creation (for instance the NDF chooser) have had their behaviour modified to not grab the focus.
• While processing FITS astrometries stored in NDFs a report to the terminal about missing FITS keywords followed by a failure to load the image (with a dialog message about "missing data component") could occur. This problem is now fixed.
• The astrometry fitting toolboxes (using reference positions) have been upgraded to accept RA and Dec values with space separations. Note that in general you should use colons as the separators.
• The image print window has been modified to swap the page width and length values when changing between landscape and portrait formats. This should make better use of the full page by default.

To try out GAIA for yourself type the following command:

      %  gaia [image_file]

If you have any comments or problems with GAIA then mail:

      gaia@star.rl.ac.uk