Montage Viewer: Basic Example

All the mViewer functionality can be accessed through the command-line. In what follows we will use backslash/newline to make the examples more readible, as one would for a shell script.

All the mViewer "directives" are specified in the form:

-directive arg1 .. argn

where the number of arguments varies depending on the directive.

Only two directives are required: the input FITS file name and stretch arguments and the output file name (and, by inference, type):

   mViewer -gray m51.fits -2s max gaussian-log \
           -out m51.png

The first directive, -gray takes four arguments: the FITS file name, minimum stretch range, maximum stretch range, and stretch mode. Since good data stretching is essential to proper visualization, there are several variants of the stretch parameters:

The output file directive can specify either JPEG or PNG format, with PNG the default. Using "-png" or "-out" will produces PNG. For JPEG you must specify "-jpeg" exactly.