Ginga is a toolkit designed for building viewers for scientific image data in
Python, visualizing 2D pixel data in numpy arrays. It can view astronomical
data such as contained in files based on the FITS (Flexible Image Transport
System) file format. It is written and is maintained by software engineers at
the Subaru Telescope, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan.
The Ginga toolkit centers around an image display class which supports zooming
and panning, color and intensity mapping, a choice of several automatic cut
levels algorithms and canvases for plotting scalable geometric forms. In
addition to this widget, a general purpose “reference” FITS viewer is
provided, based on a plugin framework. A fairly complete set of standard
plugins are provided for features that we expect from a modern FITS viewer:
panning and zooming windows, star catalog access, cuts, star pick/fwhm,
thumbnails, etc.
