For those who are interested here is a copy of the email :
-----Original Message-----
From: ESA/Hubble Information Centre [mailto:hubble@eso.org]
Sent: Saturday, 2 October 2010 12:39 AM
To:
fitsliberator@eso.org
Subject: ESA/ESO/NASA FITS Liberator Version 3 Released - Now
stand-alone and open source
Dear all
Today, the third - and best - version of the popular ESA/ESO/NASA FITS
Liberator image-processing software has been released with several
significant improvements.
As with the previous versions of the FITS Liberator, the new version
makes another leap towards making the creation of colour images from raw
astronomical observations easier and faster. The FITS Liberator
continues to support the FITS and PDS formats, preferred by astronomers
and planetary scientists respectively, which enables data to be
processed from a wide range of telescopes and planetary probes,
including ESO's Very Large Telescope, the NASA/ESA Hubble Space
Telescope, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, ESA's XMM-Newton Telescope
and Cassini-Huygens or Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
The new FITS Liberator incorporates a faster and more streamlined
workflow. The CPU-intensive calculations have been optimised, thanks to
significantly improved memory management, and this allows for time
savings of up to 35%. For large images the savings in efficiency are
even more pronounced, also thanks to a delayed application of stretch
functions.
After consultation with the image-processing community it was decided to
make the FITS Liberator a stand-alone application, so that Adobe
Photoshop is no longer required to run it. Although Adobe Photoshop is
the preferred application for producers of advanced colour outreach
images from large observatories worldwide, a stand-alone application
will add more flexibility and be accessible by a wider user base. The
FITS Liberator now saves TIFF files, and opens them with one click in
virtually any image-processing software, including Photoshop.
Furthermore the software allows several instances of the user interface
to be open simultaneously on Windows, again leading to significant time
savings.
To sustain the future development of the software the entire source
code, consisting of nearly 30 000 lines of code is being released as
open source, and anyone wishing to contribute to future versions of the
programme may do so.
More information, download links and contacts are available on:
http://www.spacetelescope.org/announcements/ann1013/
Best regards,
The FITS Liberator team
___________________________________ ____________
Fitsliberator mailing list