CASG Software links

Our group has been involved in a wide variety of software development over the years. A number of these software pakages are publically available.

• H-Compress is a widely-used "lossy-compression" technique developed by Rick White and used by our group to compress the DSS images by ~10x for public distribution.
• GetImage is "unsupported software" developed by STScI to recontruct a DSS image for any position in the sky. Developed for VMS and Unix platforms.
• HTM (Hierarchical Triangulated Mesh) is an efficient numerical/geometical way of partitioning the sky into smaller and smaller areas that is used extensively by the GSC-II and SDSS projects. It is also becoming more popular in the VO toolkit.
• ShowSky is prototype JAVA code used for accessing and visualing DSS images and various catalogs as well as HTM boundaries. Precursor to VO tools.
• VO Registry is a prototype implementation of a searchable database for publishing and locating VO services and application.

In addition to these tools, we also provide links to other software that we use

• CFITSIO is a popular FITS file subroutine/class library
• FITS File Verifier is an on-line tool to verify FITS file compliance
• Fv is an easy to use interactive FITS file editor
• WCSlib is a class library for manipulates World Coordinate System keywords in FITS headers
• WCSTools is another popular library for WCS manipulation
• SAOImage ds9 is a popular visualization tool
• Aladin is an extremely powerful visualization tool that is widely used
• IDL Astronomy Users Library is an invaluable add-on for anyone who uses IDL (Interactive Data Language) for astronomical visualization and analysis (like us!)
• Observing tools (calendars and calculators)