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 News (November 2011). The new ATV version 3 posted here now requires the Coyote Graphics library. This change was made because earlier this year, some routines in the IDL Astronomy User's Library were modified to depend on Coyote Graphics routines, and this required a major upgrade to the ATV code. This has several advantages, the main one being that ATV now works identically in either "device, decomposed=0" or "decomposed=1" mode. ATV version 3 also uses the new list functionality that was introduced in IDL 8.0, so it will not work with earlier IDL versions. There are several other new enhancements including an improved widget layout and the excellent cubehelix color map. See the modification history and instructions for full details. I'm calling the newly posted version a "beta" version since it contains a lot of changes and there might still be some remaining issues to be fixed, but for the most part it is working well.

What all of this means is that ATV version 3 now requires IDL 8.0 or higher and requires current versions of all of the libraries listed below.

If you are using a version of IDL that's older than 8.0, then you will not be able to run the current or future versions of ATV. I'll keep a copy of the previous ATV version (2.3) posted here for IDL 7.x users, but those users should be aware that there may be some weirdness or broken functionality in some plotting routines if ATV 2.3 is used along with a current version of the IDL Astronomy User's Library.

TROUBLESHOOTING UPDATE (November 15 2012): If you are using the most recent version of the coyote library, you may encounter some problems. A recent change to the cgcolor.pro routine causes atv to crash if you try to bring up the photometry or statistics windows. There is a simple temporary fix for this, which is to set one line of cgcolor.pro back to what it was before this recent update. In your coyote library directory, edit the cgcolor.pro routine and find the line that reads
opixel = cgSnapshot(!D.X_Size-3, !D.Y_Size-3, 1, 1)
Change this line to
opixel = cgSnapshot(!D.X_Size-1, !D.Y_Size-1, 1, 1)
and this should fix the crashing problem for now.

To run ATV, you will need:

The atv.pro source code: version 3.0b2, updated November 21 2011.
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. Note that the current version of the IDL Astronomy User's Library includes a subdirectory with a subset of the Coyote routines already, but ATV requires some Coyote Graphics routines (like cgimage.pro) that are not part of the IDL Astronomy User's Library distribution. So, you will need to install a full copy of the Coyote Graphics Library separately. I recommend deleting that subdirectory from the IDL Astronomy User's Library and replacing it with a full installation of the Coyote Graphics Library routines.
The IDL software package from Excelis Visual Information Solutions. ATV version 3 requires at least IDL 8.0.
As of version 2.3, ATV includes initial support for reading FPACK-compressed FITS files. If you want to read FPACK-formatted files, 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.

For IDL 7.x users, here is ATV version 2.3. (Note disclaimers above about compatibility issues with the current Astronomy User's Library.)

Note about other versions of ATV: There are a few alternate 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 recommend that you delete the ATV version that came with idlutils, and install the current version of ATV instead.

If you're looking for the other kind of ATV, try this instead.

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

Back to my home page.