SAOImageDS9 is an astronomical imaging and data visualization application. DS9 supports FITS images and binary tables, multiple frame buffers, region manipulation, and many scale algorithms and colormaps. It provides for easy communication with external analysis tasks and is highly configurable and extensible via XPA and SAMP.

DS9 is a stand-alone application. It requires no installation or support files. All versions and platforms support a consistent set of GUI and functional capabilities.

DS9 supports advanced features such as 2-D, 3-D and RGB frame buffers, mosaic images, tiling, blinking, geometric markers, colormap manipulation, scaling, arbitrary zoom, cropping, rotation, pan, and a variety of coordinate systems.

The GUI for DS9 is user configurable. GUI elements such as the coordinate display, panner, magnifier, horizontal and vertical graphs, button bar, and color bar can be configured via menus or the command line.

SAOImageDS9 is fully funded by the Chandra X-ray Science Center (CXC) and is licensed in part under the GNU General Public License, version 3.