iraf.net

When issuing a command to display an image, I receive the following error:ERROR: Cannot open device (node!imtool,,512,512)DS9 is available as a view but are there specific settings that need to be modified in order to have ds9 communicate with IRAF?Thanks!

Be sure that DS9 is 1) running before you try to display (it will not be opened automatically), 2) that it is running on the same machine as your iraf session (e.g. that you didn't remote login to another machine but start DS9 on your local desktop), and 3) that your iraf and DS9 were started as the same user. Remote displays are possible but by default IRAF will try to display through a local unix socket based on the userid. I'm assuming this is a fairly recent DS9?-Mike

I receive the following error when trying to display an image:Error: IIS iisIO problemsI am currently running ds9 ver. 4.0b7 and launching ds9 before iraf.
Thanks again.

The iis code apparently hasn't changed in a while but you still might try an older version in case this is some sort of memory corruprtion. The message is pretty generic, but since the IIS code was lifted from ximtool you can use the trick of setting a
DEBUG_IIS environment variable to trace the display packets, e.g. % setenv DEBUG_IIS 1a # set debug flag
% ds9 & # run in backgroundThe start iraf in a different window. When you display you should see a bunch of output in the window during a normal display, if you see nothing then check the /tmp directory for a file called ".IMTxyz" where 'xyz' is your userid. This is the local socket used for display, if it doesn't exist the fallback is the /dev/imt1[io] fifo pipes. Either/both should report as being opened in the debug output above.Lastly, you can contact the DS9 author at saord@cfa.harvard.edu in case he's aware of any problems. BTW, is this the simple dev$pix test image or something else? Does it make a difference? I'm assuming there are no error messages reported on the iraf side?-Mike

Mike,I am new to iraf so it may be a question of not knowing how to use it but I am able to open the image using ds9, however, when I launch iraf and input the 'display' command I received the same error:ERROR: Cannot open device (node!imtool,,512,512)
Does the iraf package contain it's own display drivers? I did notice the x11iraf package--is this required?Thanks.

IRAF is able to display to any supported server, DS9 included. The message generically means that no server was found running at the place IRAF was looking, which by default is the unix socket /tmp/.IMT<userid> (which is why I said check that both IRAF and DS9 are being run as the same user, that both are running on the same machine, and that you have write permission in /tmp). Various flags to DS9 can disable certain of the display options so be sure none of these are set, also be sure you don't have an IMTDEV environment variable defined which can alter how IRAF looks for a server.Otherwise, start iraf in one window and ds9 in another and it should "just work". If you're using a custom startup script like XIRAF or something local try not using it. DS9 is able to display an image standalone because it is reading the file directly, but you'll need to sort this out before being able to e.g. use image cursors in iraf tasks. X11IRAF isn't necessary
although the XGterm terminal is nicer to use, XImtool is 8-bit limited and the display code is the same so you'd probably have similar problems.-Mike

Installing the ds9 binary (4.0b8) solved the problem. ds9 (4.0b7) was originally compiled from source. Thanks for your help!