MVIEWER(1)

✨ NAME ✨

mViewer(1) — Render multi-dimensional images and large-scale images 🦋

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

Okay so mViewer? It literally makes a JPEG image file out of a FITS file — or, if you're feeling fancy, out of a set of three FITS files in full color. ✨

You can define a data range for each image, and then stretch that data using any power of the log() function (zero counts too, and that's linear, bestie. Periodt.) or with custom gaussian histogram equalization algorithms. In single-image mode, pseudo-color color tables can be applied. 💅

mViewer can also put overlays on the image: coordinate grids, source catalogs (with scaled symbols), image outlings from metadata tables, plus various markers and labels. 🎀

Along with a few other Montage modules, mViewer can be wrapped so it supports interactive image analysis from Python or through AJAX web interfaces. 🐍

Real talk: mViewer's functionality goes way beyond what a man page can reasonably capture, so the user is directed to the mViewer documentation suite. 📚

Examples: ✨

• To create a grayscale image from a FITS file:
• To create a full color image from three co-registered FITS files:
• A complex example with a catalog overlay (symbol size, shape and color controlled by table columns), image metadata, a coordinate grid and some custom labeling:

💀 BUGS 💀

The drizzle algorithm? It's been implemented, but it has not been tested in this release. 💀

If a header template has carriage returns (i.e., it was created/modified on a Windows machine), the cfitsio library will be unable to read it properly, and you'll get this error: [struct stat="ERROR", status=207, msg="illegal character in keyword"] 😭

Now, background correction algorithms are happiest when the area described in the header template completely encloses all of the input images in their entirety. If the header template leaves parts of input images "chopped off", the background correction gets affected. So we recommend an expanded header for the reprojection and background modeling steps, then going back to the originally desired header size for the final coaddition. The default background matching assumes no non-linear background variations in the individual images (and therefore in the overlap differences). If there's any uncertainty there, it's safer to turn on the "level only" background matching — the -l flag in mBgModel. 🫶

👑 COPYRIGHT 👑

2001-2015 California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California. 🎀

If your research uses Montage, please include this acknowledgement: "This research made use of Montage. It is funded by the National Science Foundation under Grant Number ACI-1440620, and was previously funded by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Earth Science Technology Office, Computation Technologies Project, under Cooperative Agreement Number NCC5-626 between NASA and the California Institute of Technology." 💖

The Montage distribution includes an adaptation of the MOPEX algorithm developed at the Spitzer Science Center. 🌌

This page is from Montage 5, dated Dec 2016, and it's the mViewer(1) manual. Byeee, bestie! 👑💅💖