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Welcome to the home of the NTV project

NTV is a FITS file and numerical array viewer written in the python programming language, written from the ground up to used either as a stand alone viewer, or from a python interpreter session. Other viewers exist, such as DS9 and its python bindings, but suffer from various drawbacks. DS9, for instance, is an industry standard but suffers from increasing age, making compilation on newer systems difficult and updating functionality prohibitive for the great majority of users. NTV aims to fix this problem in two important ways. Firstly by choosing python for the core language we aim to provide an environment friendly to users more comfortable with modern interpreted garbage collected languages. This also provides a framework for rapid development, updating, and easy cross platform usage. The second way NTV solves the problem of ever changing usage is through a plugins architecture that enables anyone to write and distribute modules to suit their individual visualization needs. Though NTV is written in python, and ships with modules to use with a python interpreter session, it is written with standard web technologies so that anyone may write bindings to their favorite data processing language. We hope to soon to provide bindings to both Matlab and IDL, and would welcome developers interested in taking on that task.

• Installation instructions can be found at installing the software
• Please go to getting started for a detailed introduction
• In-depth descriptions on standard functionality and default plugins can be found at usage
• Developers interested in making and distributing their own plugins should read plugins for guidelines