ann0911 — Announcement

ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator v. 2.3 released

30 October 2009

The release of version 2 of the popular ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator image processing software has meant that it is even easier and faster to create colour images using raw observations from a range of telescopes, including the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, ESO’s Very Large Telescope and ESA’s XMM-Newton Telescope.

Version 1 of the ESA/ESO/NASA Photoshop FITS Liberator was completed in July 2004 by imaging scientists at the European Space Agency, the European Southern Observatory and NASA. FITS stands for Flexible Image Transport System. This single file format archives nearly all images of stars, nebulae and galaxies produced by major telescopes around the world. Before July 2004 this file format was primarily accessible to scientists working with highly specialised image processing tools.

More than 60,000 laypeople, educators and amateur astronomers have started using the Liberator since the release of v.1 in July 2004. The FITS Liberator has also become the industry standard for professional imaging scientists at the European Space Agency, the European Southern Observatory and NASA.

Version 2.3 of the FITS Liberator include the following new features:

• Full support for Photoshop CS4 (on both Mac and Windows).
• Significant performance (speed) enhancement through the usage of multiple CPUs and CPU cores as well as an improved memory management strategy (helpful especially for large images).
• Support for planetary images through the PDS image format.
• Metadata editing support for Photoshop CS4.
• Options has been added including the histogram markers stretched mean, stretched median, peak level and background level.
• It is now possible to change the default initial guess between three different modes (a specified percentage of the histogram for the black and white levels, the mean +/- the standard deviation or the median +/- the standard deviation).
• The World Coordinate System (WCS) coordinates are now given when the user sweeps the image pixels with the mouse pointer.

Links

• Download FITS Liberator 2.3
• More information about FITS
• More information about PDS
• More about the Astronomy Visualization Metadata standard

Contacts

Lars Holm Nielsen
ESO education and Public Outreach Department, Garching, Germany
Tel: +49-89-3200-6615
Cellular: +49-151-2265-2416
E-mail: lnielsen@eso.org

Lars Lindberg Christensen
ESO education and Public Outreach Department, Garching, Germany
Tel: +49-89-3200-6761
Cellular: +49-173-3872-621
E-mail: lars@eso.org