SAOimage (pronounced S-A-0-image) is a utility for displaying astronomical images in the X11 window environment. It was written at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory by Mike Van Hilst in 1990 and is now maintained by Doug Mink. Image files can be read directly, or image data may be passed through a named pipe (Unix) or a mailbox (VMS) from IRAF display tasks. SAOimage provides a large selection of options for zooming, panning, scaling, coloring, pixel readback, display blinking, and region specification. User interactions are generally performed with the mouse. Mouse tracking in an image's world coordinate system, usually sky coordinates, was added in 1994.

The SAOimage desktop includes, a main image display window, a button menu panel, a display magnifier, a pan and zoom reference image, and a color bar. A color table graph window can be brought up by clicking on the color bar.

Last updated 19 December 1997 by Doug Mink dmink@cfa.harvard.edu