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SkyView in a Jar

SkyView can now execute on your own machine! You can get SkyView's capabilities without going through SkyView's Web site. There are no limits to the number of images you can generate using this new application.

Download the SkyView JAR and you can get started. The SkyView JAR is executable so that you can use it as an application as simply as
java -jar skyview.jar survey=dss position=3c273
You will need a recent version of Java, V1.5 or higher. This application supports most of the functionality of the SkyView Web pages for generating FITS files including almost all of the surveys available on-line. You can easily add your own files and surveys. It is especially easy to add a survey whenever the data is available through the new Virtual Observatory Simple Image Access protocol.

Features of this new Java application include:

  • New high order resamplers including Lanczos and Spline resampling which retain more information when using well-sampled images.
  • An efficient exact-area flux-conserving reampler replacing the extremely cumbersome and bug-ridden triangular-decomposition sampler.
  • Better algorithms for the selection of which survey image to resample. This should help eliminate small unsampled regions in your images.
  • Smaller memory footprint which enables very large images to be generated. (Though users may need to become familiar with the -mx option of the Java command.)
  • Ability for users to easily add in their own surveys.
  • Easy linkage to datasets described by the Virtual Obsevatory Simple Image Access protocol -- including the latest release of the SDSS survey which hasn't yet (10/10/05) made it into the Web interface!
  • Users can easily plug in their own samplers, projections, coordinate systems, and even their versions of internal classes used in the program.
  • Users needn't share the limited resources of the SkyView web server and can run this service on as many clients as they desire.
These is one major caveat: this version of the program only generates FITS images. None of the GIF or overlay generation tools available in the SkyView Web interface are supported. Subsequent versions of the tool will address these needs.

Documenation is available in Word and HTML. The JavaDocs for the Java classes are also available.

Please contact Tom McGlynn or Laura McDonald if you have questions or comments about this package.