ginga 1.4-20130410193624

An astronomical (FITS) image viewer and toolkit.

GINGA ABOUT

Ginga is a viewer for astronomical data FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) files.

The Ginga viewer centers around a new FITS display widget which supports zooming and panning, color and intensity mapping, a choice of several automatic cut levels algorithms and canvases for plotting scalable geometric forms. In addition to this widget, the fits viewer provides a flexible plugin framework for extending the viewer with many different features. A fairly complete set of “standard” plugins are provided for features that we expect from a modern viewer: panning and zooming windows, star catalog access, cuts, star pick/fwhm, thumbnails, etc.

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (c) 2011-2013 Eric R. Jeschke. All rights reserved. Ginga is distributed under an open-source BSD licence. Please see the file LICENSE.txt in the top-level directory for details.

BUILDING AND INSTALLATION

Ginga uses a standard distutils based install, e.g.

$ python setup.py build

or

$ python setup.py install

The program can then be run using the command “ginga”

For further information please see the file ginga/doc/INSTALL.txt

MANUAL

You can find copies of a PDF manual online at https://github.com/ejeschke/ginga/downloads

Also look in ginga/doc/manual

DEVELOPERS

See scripts/example{1,2}_gtk.py and scripts/example{1,2}_qt.py . There is more information for developers in the manual.

ON THE WEB

http://ejeschke.github.com/ginga

ETYMOLOGY

“Ginga” is the romanized spelling of the Japanese word “銀河” (hiragana: ぎんが), meaning “galaxy” (in general) and, more familiarly, the Milky Way. This viewer was written by software engineers at Subaru Telescope, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan–thus the connection.

Pronunciation

Ginga the viewer may be pronounced “ging-ga” (proper japanese) or “jing-ga” (perhaps easier for western tongues). The latter pronunciation has meaning in the Brazilian dance/martial art capoeira: a fundamental rocking or back and forth swinging motion.