DS9 is a stand-alone application. It requires no installation or support files. Versions of DS9 currently exist for Sun Solaris, Sun Solaris64, Linux, LinuxPPC, Windows NT/2000/XP, and MacOSX (darwin). 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.

Features:

• Stars can be right-clicked to display a data popup window.
• Stars can be displayed or hidden by spectral class and absolute magnitude (also shown above).
• Stellar absolute magnitude limits can be auto-set based on the radius of the chart.
• Non-stellar objects such as nebulae are also supported.
• The stars being viewed may be plotted on a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.
• Charts may be viewed in either celestial or galactic coordinate systems.
• Charts may be recentered, rotated, or zoomed in or out with a mouse click (this can also, of course, be done via dialog boxes for more precision).
• Current chart parameters may be saved to a file and reloaded later.
• The data file format is easy to read, well-documented, and text based.
• StarPlot is packaged with a program (starconvert) that converts line-oriented stellar data records to StarPlot format. Several well-known star catalogues are available from this website, complete with all the data needed for conversions.

Requires: Linux (or any other Unix), the GTK+ library (included in most Linux distributions), and the GNUPLOT plotting program (also included in most Linux distributions).

The current development version includes support for Raw color mode work with alignment and stacking modules; Raw color display work with SDL display; preliminary support for raw RGB mode (raw data is converted to rgb) and support of Serial mod (WIP).

Other main features included are:

• automatic integration of multiple images
• saving images in PNG, BMP and JPG formats
• histogram function to help fine tunning the settings
• sharpness indicator

Features:

• Saving and loading of universes
• Infinite undo (erase last action) and goback (return to point in time just after last action). This allows for undoing mistakes and replaying interesting configurations.
• Traces of planet trajectories
• Two ways of dealing with planet collisions: merges, where the colliding planets are merged into one planet, and bounces, where the colliding planets are bounced off each other elastically. This itself comes in two varieties: force bouncing, where the force between planets is made repulsive at close quarters. true bouncing, where simple pool-table physics calculations are made to determine when planets collide, and compute the appropriate bounce from said collision.
• kidmode, a mode where the focus is (mostly) locked on the application, and interesting changes are initiated by merely banging on the keyboard. This mode is aimed at 1-5 year olds.
• Center-of-mass following: it is possible to follow the center of mass of a subset of the planets. Thus, if you have a sun-moon-planet system, you can have the view automatically track the moon-planet pair.
• Can display kinetic, potential and total energy of the system.
• Both the gravitational constant and the gravitational exponent can be changed.
• There is a simple control panel that makes it possible to see and change the simulation options.
• Zooming, panning, and centering on the center of mass

Data such as a spacecraft's sub-satellite point, azimuth and elevation headings, Doppler shift, path loss, slant range, orbital altitude, orbital velocity, footprint diameter, orbital phase (mean anomaly), squint angle, eclipse depth, the time and date of the next AOS (or LOS of the current pass), orbit number, and sunlight and visibility information are provided on a real-time basis. PREDICT can also track (or predict the position of) the Sun and Moon. PREDICT also has the ability to control AZ/EL antenna rotators to maintain accurate orientation in the direction of communication satellites. As an aid in locating and tracking satellites through optical means, PREDICT can articulate tracking coordinates and visibility information as plain speech.