SAOImage DS9 Version 4.0 New Features

Backward Compatibility Issues

A number of minor changes have been made to DS9 and the XPA and Command line interface of DS9 to bring about a more consistent behavior. While all efforts have been made to provide backward compatibility, in a few cases, this was not possible. Below is a list of changes in which backward compatibility was not maintained:
  1. xpaset -p region <filename>
    The defaut argument is now assumed to be a file name of a regions file, not a text string defining a region.

Catalogs

DS9 provides full support for loading, displaying, filtering, and saving catalogs. Most major catalogs can be retrieved from online servers.

2MASS Image Server

In addition to the DSS image server, DS9 now provides support for the 2MASS image server hosted by IPAC.

Composite Regions

A Composite Region is a region which is a collection of other regions, which share common properties. A composite region is composed of a center point and a rotation angle, of which all its members are rendered in reference to. For more information see Composite Region

Template Regions

A Template Region is a special form of a region which is saved in a special wcs coordinate system WCS0. WCS0 indicates that the ra and dec values are relative to the current WCS location, not absolute. For more information see Template Region

Instrument FOV

DS9 now supports a number of instrument field of view region templates. To select an instrument fov region, select 'Regions:Shape:Instrument FOV'.

New Regions

DS9 now supports ellipse panda (epanda) and box panda (box panda) funtool regions.

Smoothing

Support for smoothing has been expanded to include support for images, binary tables, data cubes, and mosaics.

Printing Colorbar

Support for printing the current colorbar has been added.

For more detailed information, Please see Release Notes