SUN/214.44

Starlink Project
Starlink User Note 214.44

Peter W. Draper, Norman Gray, David S. Berry & Mark Taylor

11th June 2021

GAIA – Graphical Astronomy and Image Analysis Tool

4.4-9

User’s Manual

pdfpict

Abstract

GAIA is an image and data-cube display and analysis tool for astronomy. It provides the usual facilities of image display tools, plus more astronomically useful ones such as aperture & optimal photometry, contouring, source detection, surface photometry, arbitrary region analysis, celestial coordinate readout, calibration and modification, grid overlays, blink comparison, defect patching and the ability to query on-line catalogues and image servers. It can also display slices from data-cubes, extract and visualise spectra as well as perform full 3D rendering.

Contents

1 Introduction
2 Getting Started
 2.1 Using GAIA from the C-shell
3 What does it actually do?
 3.1 Image display capabilities
 3.2 Image analysis capabilities
 3.3 On-line catalogue capabilities
 3.4 Local catalogues
  3.4.1 Catalogue formats
  3.4.2 Using your own local catalogues
  3.4.3 FITS tables
 3.5 CUPID catalogues and masks
 3.6 Accessing images of differing formats
 3.7 SAMP interoperability
4 Configuration options
 4.1 Proxy servers
 4.2 Add new colour and intensity maps
5 GAIA demonstration
6 Finding out more about SkyCat
7 Acknowledgements