pyDS9plugin is the first open source pythonic SAOImageDS9 quick look plugin.

Click on the image to see the 3 minutes youtube presentation video:

SAOImage DS9 is an astronomical imaging and data visualization application. Its 30 years of development has made it very stable and easy to use. This made it an essential tool in all fields of astronomy (observation, simulation, instrumentation). Much more profitable but pretty unsung feature, its extensibility makes it a limitless tool to interact with astronomical data. This extensibility did not generate a large collaborative and well organized effort to develop important extensions that could progressively converge towards a stable/rapid/configurable multi-extension DS9 package.

Because I am convince of its interest, this extension is a very naive attempt to try initiate this tendency and explore the different possibilities.

The goal is the pyds9plugin is then three-fold:

• Boosting the way we interact with scientific images in a quantitative way to earn important time
• Try to bring the visualization software DS9 a step further by combining it to image processing tools
• Create a code collaboration catalyst by providing a first extensive package gathering a glimpse of all the possibilities that offers DS9 extensibility

To install pyds9plugin for general purposes use Pip:

pip install pyds9plugin

or

pip3 install git+https://github.com/vpicouet/pyds9plugin.git

Finish the installation and see the different functions by running:

DS9Utils

Finally, load the analysis file in DS9 by running:

DS9Utils LoadDS9QuickLookPlugin

And launch DS9! If you are using Anaconda, install using the above call to pip from inside your environment. There is not as of yet a separate conda package.

The documentation of the extension is available here.

Contributions are welcome in the form of suggestions for additional features, pull requests with new features or bug fixes, etc. If you find bugs or have questions, open an Issue here. If and when the project grows, a code of conduct will be provided along side a more comprehensive set of guidelines for contributing; until then, just be nice.

• Command line access: The package is totally accessible via command line. Run DS9Utils to see all the available function and DS9Utils function -h to see the help of each function. All the arguments of the functions are parsed through argparse module which makes the functions not only accessible from DS9, but from terminal and python using argv argument.
• Multi-processing: PyDS9plugin is by essence a quicklook plug-in that is perfect to analyze and process images on the fly by changing parameters and so on. But it was important for us to make it suitable for more important pipelines as soon as you are ok with the parameters to use. To this end, most of the functions are compatible with multi-processing so that they can be run on a set of images.
• Multi-operability: Command line access and python import allows to operate the plugin for other pipelines. The plugin for DS9 could actually pretty easily be operated by other visualization softwares like ginga or glueviz.
• Python interpreter/macros
• VTK 3D rendering
• Interactive profile fitting