ATV: an interactive display tool for IDL

ATV.PRO

An interactive display tool for astronomical images written in IDL.

ATV is a program for display and analysis of astronomical images using the IDL image-processing language. It allows interactive control of the image scaling, color table, color stretch, and zoom, with support for world coordinate systems. It also does point-and-click aperture photometry, simple spectral extractions, and can produce publication-quality postscript output images.

About ATV
Instructions for using ATV
Modification history
Credits

ATV requires IDL version 8.0 or higher, and the libraries listed below. It is particularly important to have up-to-date versions of the GSFC IDL astronomy user's library and the Coyote library, since there have been very substantial changes to the GSFC library and its dependence on Coyote routines during the past few years.

To run ATV, you will need:

The atv.pro source code: version 3.0b8, updated Nov 28 2016.
Craig Markwardt's cmps_form.pro , for setting postscript parameters
The GSFC IDL Astronomy User's Library (direct link to gzipped tar file here). Make sure you have an up-to-date version of this library!
The Coyote Graphics library - very useful graphics routines by David Fanning.
The IDL software package from NV5 Geospatial Solutions.
ATV can read FPACK-compressed FITS files. To do this, you'll need the CFITSIO library and also the FPACK/FUNPACK routines from the NASA HEASARC website. Follow the instructions given on the HEASARC site to install those routines. If you're having trouble reading FPACK-compressed images into ATV, see the About ATV page for some tips.

Note about other versions of ATV: There are a few alternate and forked versions of ATV that can be found on other sites, some of them modified to add features specific to certain telescopes or instruments. These include a version designed for reduction of Spitzer IRS data (as part of the SMART package), the PhAst program which includes added astrometry and photometry functionality, and a very old version of ATV with added HEALPIX support that's distributed as part of the idlutils package. However: I take no responsibility for any forked versions of ATV, and the instructions and information on this site may not apply to any modified ATV versions that you find elsewhere.

If you're using the idlutils distribution but don't need to use the HEALPIX support, then I strongly recommend that you delete the ATV version that came with idlutils, and install the current version of ATV instead. Also, note that there may be other incompatibility issues between idlutils and the current versions of the GSFC and Coyote libraries.

Questions? Comments? Email me at barth [at] uci [dot] edu .

Back to my home page.