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<meta name="GENERATOR" content="Mozilla/4.78 [en] (X11; U; Linux
2.4.7-10 i686) [Netscape]">
<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>
<blockquote>
<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>
</blockquote>
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