GINGA ABOUT
-----------
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 Subaru Telescope, National
Astronomical Observatory of Japan.

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 AND LICENSE
---------------------
Copyright (c) 2011-2014  Eric R. Jeschke.  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.

BUILDING AND INSTALLATION
-------------------------
Ginga uses a standard distutils based install, e.g.

    $ python setup.py build

or

    $ python setup.py install

The program can then be run using the command "ginga"

For further information please see the detailed installation
instructions in the documentation.

DOCUMENTATION
-------------
It is online at
http://ginga.readthedocs.org/en/latest/index.html

DEVELOPERS
----------
See examples/*/example{1,2}_*.py .
There is more information for developers in the manual.

ON THE WEB
----------
http://ejeschke.github.com/ginga

ETYMOLOGY
---------
"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 written by software engineers at Subaru
Telescope, National Astronomical Observatory of Japan--thus the
connection. 

Pronunciation
-------------
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.  Pronounciation as "jin-ja"
is considered poor form.

