FITS Viewer and VMI Analysis: A Program for Analysing and Circularising VMI Images (version 4.0)

This program was written to display and analyse 2-dimensional data, in particular for the analysis of Velocity Mapped Imaging (VMI) data and 2-Dimensional Laser Induced Fluorescence (2D-LIF) data. The program uses the Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) file format for loading, processing and saving of images, although images stored as text may also be imported. The program incorporates many functions to process VMI images. In particular, routines are provided to perform the Inverse Abel Transform on experimental images and generate polar coordinate images of the raw and transformed data. In addition, for raw VMI images that are affected by non-circularity due to stray electric and magnetic fields, routines are provided to determine such distortions and produce a circularised (undeformed) image. This program has been developed and used at Flinders University since 1998 for analysis of VMI and more recently 2D-LIF data. The program can be used in a PC environment (Windows operating system). Material includes executable file, program manual and example images.