[AstroPy] Sampy and ds9

[Wolfgang Kerzendorf]

Hi Mark,

First of all. Thanks for the help.

  It seems I can connect to hub opened by Aladin (even though I can't  
seem to see the python client in ds9's sent-to dialogue). It seems  
SAMP would be really useful to shift data around between topcat, ds9,  
aladin AND python.
Is there a tutorial online that shows simple python scripts to talk to  
ds9 (marking points, sending an image with wcs, controlling other  
features of ds9, ...).
Cheers
     Wolfgang
On 25/08/2009, at 14:10 , Mark Taylor wrote:

> On Sun, 23 Aug 2009, Rick Wagner wrote:
>
>> Hi Wolfgang,
>>
>>> I have just installed Sampy and was excited about letting it talk to
>>> ds9. Unfortunatley I tried to run a SAMPY hub and when I tried to
>>> connect with DS9 it gave an internal error. I then ran ds9 and  
>>> Aladin,
>>> so I guess one of them supplies the hub. I tried to connect to the  
>>> hub
>>> but ds9 doesnt see the client. Has anyone gotten sampy talking to  
>>> ds9?
>>> I hope this is the right mailinglist for this
>>> cheers
>>>     Wolfgang
>>
>> I'm a little familiar with SAMP-enabled applications, and I'll try  
>> to help if
>> I can. To begin, I believe Aladin does provide both a client and hub
>> interface. If you want to test ds9 and Aladin as clients talking to  
>> a separate
>> hub, you should try running a standalone hub such as JSAMP [1], or  
>> Perl SAMP
>> [2]. Depending on how this works out, you'll know whether to  
>> contact the SAMPy
>> developers (Luigi Paioro), or the ds9 developers (Bill Joye). For  
>> reference,
>> you can find links to several SAMP-enabled applications on the IVOA  
>> wiki [3],
>> including the what version of the application supports SAMP.
>>
>> (I don't know how many others on the AstroPy mailing list are using  
>> SAMP hubs
>> and applications, so I'm cross-posting this to the SAMP standard  
>> mailing list.
>> It's not really the place for user support, but hopefully you'll  
>> hear from one
>> of the ds9 or SAMP developers.)
>
> Wolfgang,
>
> sorry this isn't working smoothly.  I believe that the ds9 and SAMPy
> people are talking to each other, so it ought to be OK;
> but having said that, if I try using the latest 5.7 beta version
> of ds9 and the public 1.11.0 release of SAMPy, it doesn't work
> for me (ds9 reports "Malformed URL" and fails to connect).
>
> I can hack it so that it works: after starting the SAMPy hub,
> hand-edit the ~/.samp file and add a trailing "/" to the line
> that starts "samp.hub.xmlrcp.url=", before starting ds9.
> This obviously isn't ideal; it shouldn't be necessary, and I
> think it's a ds9 bug which hopefully the author will address soon.
>
> As Rick says, in the mean time you could use a different hub,
> e.g. the JSAMP one.  You would still be able to use the SAMPy
> clients in this case, i.e. use python scripting to control ds9
> or other applications.  Feel free to ask on this list (or to me
> direct) if you have any further questions.
>
> Mark
>
> PS:  Rick, thanks for bouncing this to apps-samp - I think it's OK
>     to use it for user support issues which are, or look like they
>     may be, related to SAMP infrastructure issues.
>
> --
> Mark Taylor   Astronomical Programmer   Physics, Bristol University,  
> UK
> m.b.taylor at bris.ac.uk +44-117-928-8776 http://www.star.bris.ac.uk/ 
> ~mbt/