FV

FV is an advanced CAD program whose purpose is to help you view and edit FITS images and tables which store astronomical information. You can run it on Windows, Unix and Mac OS X platforms.

The program includes two main tools which are used for reading, writing and editing FITS files, as well as displaying images and plotting graphs.

The tool does not impress much in the visual department, as it sports an old design. The features are not highly intuitive but you can access the help manual in case you need further assistance.

FV features spreadsheet-like functionality for helping you edit header keywords and check the pixels in an image or entries in a table.

A summary window shows the contents and size of all the extensions in the FITS file. Plus, you are allowed to copy, cut or paste extensions to/from the clipboard and append empty extensions of image, ASCII table, and binary table to existing files.

You can display images or plots using either DS9 or POW as the primary viewer, generate a histogram image of one or two columns in a table, plot table columns, and select the columns that you want to display. The selected columns can be revealed in a scrolling spreadsheet, and you can edit the values in the table and insert or delete rows and columns.

What’s more, FV lets you display FITS headers in a scrolling text window, edit, add or delete keywords, generate an ASCII text listing of the header, as well as create checksum keywords.

You can generate line plots of one or more columns from a table in the POW widget, work with a spreadsheet calculator for defining new columns, as well as check out the minimum, maximum and mean values for any selected column.

FV comes with support for advanced functions for helping you analyze and alter FITS images and tables. The feature pack is quite overwhelming so you may need extra time in order to tweak the configuration parameters.