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Last modified: 24 October 2023

URL: https://cxc.cfa.harvard.edu/ciao/guides/dax.html
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DAX: ds9 analysis extensions

or The CIAO Tools Analysis Menu in DS9

ds9 menu bar with Analysis menu circled

dax*, the Ds9 Analysis eXtensions, is a collection of CIAO tasks that have been integrated with SAOImage DS9 using ds9's analysis menu interface. dax provides users access to many CIAO tools and applications using a simplified graphical user interface.

ds9 menu bar with CIAO Tools (DAX) menu circled

With dax users can perform various image processing operations (eg adaptive and non-linear smoothing), compute net counts and fluxes, perform source detection, and even modeling and fitting of spectra and 2D images using Sherpa.

outline showing dax tasks

The tasks outlined in red are new in the CIAO 4.12.4, September 2020, CIAO contributed scripts release. The existing tasks outlined in blue have significant updates. The tasks with a red-circle indicate tasks which either require or will use the regions drawn.

Additional Resources

The Chandra CIAO YouTube channel contains numerous videos showing how to use dax and ds9. Twenty (20) new videos have been added as part of the CIAO 4.12.4 release to highlight new functionality and updates to the existing dax tasks.

We have also prepared a collection of slides (pdf), Jupyter notebooks, and sample data files (400Mb) describing how to use ds9 and dax.

/ ciao / guides / dax.html