ATV: an interactive display tool for IDL

ATV.PRO

An interactive display tool for astronomical images written in IDL.

ATV is a program designed for displaying astronomical images using the IDL image-processing language. It allows complete interactive control of the image scaling, color table, color stretch, and zoom. It handles world coordinate systems, image blinking, and overplotting of text, line graphics, or contours on the image. It also does point-and-click aperture photometry, and can produce publication-quality postscript output (here's an example ).

About ATV: list of features, known bugs and weirdnesses, disclaimer...
Instructions: a detailed guide to the program and its features
What ATV looks like when you use it.
Modification history.
Credits.

To run ATV, you will need:

The atv.pro source code. You have 2 options:

Current beta version (2.0b4, last modified November 27 2007). Please read these notes if you're trying the beta version for the first time.
The previous stable release is still here (1.52, last modified August 1 2006)

Craig Markwardt's cmps_form.pro , for setting postscript parameters ( direct link to procedure file here )
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 IDL software package from ITT.

New: ATV can now be run without an IDL license, using the IDL Virtual Machine. Here's what you need:

The atv.sav file containing the compiled version of ATV plus all supporting routines
The IDL package, which you can install for free without a license. Here's a link to the instructions from ITT on how to install and run the IDL Virtual Machine, which will allow you to execute the atv.sav file without a license.

Note about other versions of ATV.PRO: There are at least 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), and an older version of ATV 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 looking for the other kind of ATV, take a look here , here , or here .

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

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