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<title>Story of SAOImageDS9</title>
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<h3><img alt="" src="sun.gif" width="100" height="98" align=
"middle"> The Story of SAOImageDS9: How DS9 got its name<br></h3>
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<p>In 1990, Mike Van Hilst, at the Smithsonian Astrophysical
Observatory, Center for Astrophysics, Harvard University, developed
SAOImage. SAOImage was first implemented in X10, then reimplemented
in X11. In fact, it was one of the first X11 based applications
publicly made available. SAOImage was a brilliant program,
implementing techniques in scientific visualization 20 years ago
that are still being used by today's applications. Since Mike's
departure from SAO, SAOImage has been maintained by Jessica
Mink.</p>
<p>In the mid 1990's, with the administrative support of Steve
Murray, Eric Mandel developed SAOtng, or (SAOImage, The Next
Generation), named after the Star Trek series. TNG was based on
IRAF's XIMTOOL graphics libraries and Tcl. It explored new GUI
interfaces and supported a new external analysis interface. In
particular, it utilized XPA, (X11 Public Access, also written by
Eric) which allowed TNG to be scripted via a shell, or from other
application.</p>
<p>In 1998, while working with Eric, William Joye began a complete
rewrite of TNG, based on the experience developed while supporting
TNG. This project was funded by the NASA Applied Information
Systems Research Program, under the title "Future Directions for
Astronomical Image Display". For lack of a name, the new project
was referred to as DS9, the logical extension of the Star Trek
series. The name continues to be in use. Current funding is
provided by the NASA High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive
Center and the Chandra X-ray Science Center.<br></p>
<p>DS9 is a Tcl/Tk application. The GUI is implemented as a very
thin layer of Tk. A number of Tk Canvas widgets in C++ were created
to support all the functionality needed. Basically, all the real
work is done in C++. DS9 inherited TNG's support of regions, XPA,
external analysis support, and the general GUI. However, all the
visualization techniques come directly from SAOImage.</p>
<p>The current version of DS9 is composed of the Tk widgets created
along with support from about 20 other open source products
(including Tcl/Tk, AST, BLT, HCompress, HTMLWidget, plio, rics,
tcllib, tclxml, tkcon, tkimg, tktable, wcssubs, xmlrpc, XPA, zip,
zlib, and zvfs). The distributed binaries consist of a
self-contained self-extracting archive and application, which
provides an independent Tcl/Tk environment without
installation.</p>
<p>The first versions of DS9 were made available in 1999. Since
then, the popularity of DS9 has grown far beyond
expectations.<br></p>
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