SAOImage DS9 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.

DS9 is a stand-alone application. It requires no installation or support files. Versions of DS9 currently exist for Sun Solaris, Linux, Linux64, MacOSX, and Windows XP. All versions and platforms support a consistent set of GUI and functional capabilities.

DS9 supports advanced features such as multiple frame buffers, mosaic images, tiling, blinking, geometric markers, colormap manipulation, scaling, arbitrary zoom, rotation, pan, and a variety of coordinate systems. DS9 also supports FTP and HTTP access.

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

DS9 is a Tk/Tcl application which utilizes the SAOTk widget set. It also incorporates the X Public Access (XPA) mechanism to allow external processes to access and control its data, GUI functions, and algorithms.

New releases of the DS9 binaries, including new features and bug fixes, are made available 3 times a year on January 15th, April 15th, and October 15th.