Chandra Announcement: CIAO contributed scripts with significantly enhanced dax

[Tara Gokas]

CIAO contributed scripts with significantly enhanced dax released on 22 Sep 2020

A new contributed scripts package for CIAO 4.12 has been released with a significantly enhanced version of dax.

Installation instructions can be found at https://cxc.cfa.harvard.edu/ciao/download/scripts/

 

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 allows users to access many CIAO tools and applications using a simplified graphical user interface. 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.

Major updates in this 2020 dax release include:
- many new CIAO tasks including, wavdetect, Chandra PSF, Chandra Grating Energy Lookup, image processing tasks and more

- enhanced Sherpa spectral fitting, including an expanded list of available spectral models and the ability to specify a second additive model component.

- a new model parameter editor for Sherpa and the ability to interactively adjust the plots and results.
- a progress bar for most tasks

More information about dax can be found in the help file, in the new dax analysis guide and in the CIAO scripts version history.The Chandra CIAO YouTube channel contains numerous videos (many new to this release) showing how to use dax and ds9.