Affiliation
American Association of Variable Star Observers (AAVSO)
Thu, 01/24/2013 - 22:13
Hello
I would like to develop a plot of the isophots for an image of a nebulea around a variable star. I have the image in .fits format. I have tried to use Maxim to do this, but cannot. Is there a freeware or low cost software that would allow one to do this?
Thanks
Gary
Hi Gary,
I don't see much use in the amateur community but I am growing fond of Aladin (JAVA-based). It is suited to astronomy and will do contours. Aladin is a tool in the virtual astronomy (VO) initiative. There are lots of other VO software tools that I am exploring (topcat, saada), neat stuff.
http://aladin.u-strasbg.fr/
Michael
I believe IRAF will do this (of course!), and I remember writing such a tool back when I was at Goddard many decades ago, so it can't be too difficult. Another package is superMongo:
http://www.astro.princeton.edu/~rhl/sm/
which I think Robert Lupton will give out freely to needy people. It is a nice interactive plotting package that also comes with a software-callable library of routines.
Arne
I decided to use DS9 to make some isophots and contour plots. Userd it for putting scale info on the charts. I can save this info, and view it as a JPG in various programs, but I would like to reopen it in DS9 and edit some of the annotations. Is this possible.?