Loren Anderson Last modified: Wed May 28 14:28:03 EDT 2008
Plot_Fits is an astronomical display program written in IDL.
This program could not have been written without David Fanning's Coyote program library and the AstroLib. I have also gained significant knowledge of IDL from David's site, as well as the IDL Google group. Much of the consideration for how an astronomical program should function was taken from DS9 and KVis. In fact, I have tried to maintain the same controls that these programs use unless I found it to be confusing or inconvenient.
My goal with this program was simply to incorporate the functions that I need in my own research on HII regions. This simple statement explains a lot of the functions and features (bugs) in the program. First and foremost, I needed a program where one could extract spectra from any drawn region, as well as scan through velocity channels and easily create integrated intensity images. More recently, I have needed to do some photometry, and much of the development of the regions was for this reason. I wrote the other visualization tools to facilitate these functions. Features that are useful to me personally are in the program while those that are not are excluded. I have, however, written it in a way that should allow easy extension to any application.
Version 2.0 beta Also requires the Coyote program library, as well as the GSFC IDL Astronomy User's Library and the IDL software package from ITT.