The ATNF Visualisation Software

The tools available are:

• kubes: This program allows you to inspect one or two 2- or 3-dimensional datasets in several ways. The simplest thing to use it for is as using xmtv, i.e. displaying a dataset. The difference is that there more flexibility for zooming, special colourmaps for velocity fields etc. For 3-dimensional datasets one can play the channels, as well as the RA-VEL and DEC-VEL slices, of the datacube as a movie, in order to get an idea of the 3D structure of the emission in the datacube.

  Another application of kubes is that one can load two datasets -- one can then look at these two datasets simultanously in several ways, like blinking or contour one data set on top of the other. The advantage of kubes is that one has interactive control over zooming, contour levels etc., so it gives more flexibility than e.g. cgdisp . This mode of kubes can be used for overlaying a radio-continuum map on an optical image, or the channels of an HI datacube on the continuum or an optical image and inspecting this interactively. Note that for the contouring, the two datasets do not have to be on the same grid, they should have a proper coordinate system defined. Also note that the visualisation software can read data in fits format so one can load images from e.g. skyview directly and overlay MIRIAD \ datasets.

  kubes can also produce full colour postscript output of whatever you display.

• kslice_3D: This program allows to interactively inspect datacubes. The RA-DEC, RA-VEL and DEC-VEL slices of the datacube are shown simultanuously, and by moving the cursor one moves through the datacube.

• xray and krot.cm: These two programs do volume rendering of datacubes. This is very useful for getting an overview of the emission in data cubes, as well as for finding small errors in continuum substraction or the cleaning of the cube. The difference between xray and krot.cm is that krot.cm can do adaptive filtering, while the two programs also offer different ways of rendering the datacube.

To use these programs, you have to set up your environment. At Epping or Parkes, use

 source /applic/karma/.login
 source /applic/viz/karma/viz_setup

 source /source/karma/.login
 source /applic/viz/karma/viz_setup

To run a program, type the program name, no arguments are required.

More details can be found in the on-line documentation available on the ATNF WWW-pages, or in a compressed postscript document on the ATNF ftp-server.