Dear Chandra Users,
The first public release of volview, a lightweight S-Lang guilet for
3D volume visualization, is now available at
http://space.mit.edu/cxc/software/slang/modules/volview
Volview was motivated in part by the fact that astrophysical observation
and simulation is in the midst of a transition beyond 1D spectra and 2D
image analysis and into the realm of three-dimensional models and images.
A number of astronomy software tools exist which enable visualization
of so-called 3D data cubes, and while these are useful a problem shared
by many is that they are limited to displaying one 2D slice at a time,
optionally in series as an animation.
By allowing an entire datacube to be inspected en masse, and arbitrarily
zoomed and rotated, volview is able to reveal interesting structure in
the third dimension that can be difficult or impossible to detect in
flat images. Moreover, as a S-Lang extension volview may be used
directly within analysis environments already familiar to Chandra users,
such as ISIS, slsh, or the next major release of CIAO.
As an example consider the FITS datacube shown on the volview web page,
generated from the Spitzer observation 3310 of supernova remnant CasA,
and rendered in ISIS via
isis> require("volview")
isis> volview ( fits_read_image("casa_ll1_s12_cube.fits") )
We've also used volview to inspect hydrodynamics simulations stored in
the HDF5 format, and collaborators have been making extensive use of
volview for 3D modeling experiments as discussed at
http://space.mit.edu/hydra/v3d.html
We would be delighted to learn if you find it useful, too.
Snovum Godum,
Michael S. Noble
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Feb 12 2013 - 01:00:11 EST