Ginga is a toolkit designed for building viewers for scientific image data in Python, visualizing 2D pixel data in numpy arrays. It can view astronomical data such as contained in files based on the FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) file format. It is written and is maintained by software engineers at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ), the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI), and other contributing entities.
The Ginga toolkit centers around an image display object which supports zooming and panning, color and intensity mapping, a choice of several automatic cut levels algorithms and canvases for plotting scalable geometric forms. In addition to this widget, a general purpose "reference" FITS viewer is provided, based on a plugin framework. A fairly complete set of standard plugins are provided for features that we expect from a modern FITS viewer: panning and zooming windows, star catalog access, cuts, star pick/FWHM, thumbnails, etc.
Copyright (c) 2011-2025 Ginga Maintainers. All rights reserved.
Ginga is distributed under an open-source BSD licence. Please see the
file LICENSE.txt in the top-level directory for details.
The current release of Ginga can be downloaded and installed from pip using:
$ pip install ginga
From source code, you should also use pip, e.g.:
$ cd ginga
$ pip install -e .
The program can then be run using the command "ginga".
For further information, please see the detailed installation instructions in the documentation.
It is online at http://ginga.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ (dev) and http://ginga.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ (latest release).
See CODE_OF_CONDUCT.md.
See examples/*/example{1,2}_*.py .
There is more information for developers in the manual.
http://ejeschke.github.com/ginga
"Ginga" is the romanized spelling of the Japanese word "銀河" (hiragana: ぎんが), meaning "galaxy" (in general) and, more familiarly, the Milky Way. This viewer was originally written by software engineers at Subaru Telescope, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan; thus the connection.
Ginga the viewer may be pronounced "ging-ga" (proper japanese) or "jing-ga" (perhaps easier for Western tongues). The latter pronunciation has meaning in the Brazilian dance/martial art capoeira: a fundamental rocking or back and forth swinging motion. Pronunciation as "jin-ja" is considered poor form.
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