DS9 Graphical User Interface

The Graphical User Interface

DS9's GUI as been designed and implemented for ease of use. It is composed of a menu bar, information panel, panner, magnifer, button control panel, display frames, horizontal and vertical graphs, and a colorbar. The user may reconfigure the display by showing or hiding one or more of the elements. See Preferences for more details.

Menu bar

Tear off Menus

All DS9 menus can be used as a floating tool palette. To 'tear off' a menu, select the dashed line which is the first item of each menu. At this point, the menu will become its own window, which now can be managed by the user. Multiple copies of the same menu can be created.

Information Panel

The Information panel displays information about the current data values. The information displayed is configurable via the preferences.

Panner

The Panner allows the user to view the entire frame, along with the current viewing bounding box, image cursor, and wcs cursor. To pan the current frame, click and drag the viewing bounding box.

Magnifier

The Magnifier displays a magnified view of the current mouse cursor location. The Magnifier cursor outlines the size and orientation of one pixel, given the current frame zoom and orientation.

Button Control Panel

The Button Control panel provides duplicate menu functionality for ease of use.

Frames

FITS images are displayed in Frames. Frames may be viewed one at a time, or all at once in Tile mode. Only one frame is the Current Frame, as indicated by the Blue Border, while in Tile mode. Most functions act only on the Current Frame.

Graphs

Horizontal and Vertical graphs are available to display a cut through the current frame data. While the mouse cursor is in a graph, the information panel reflects the current data values. Graphs are not available while in Tile Mode.

Colorbar

The Colorbar displays the current colormap and current bias and contrast settings.