Development of enhanced FITS image viewer with graphic user interface

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), previously known as the Next Generation Space telescope, is expected to gather a vast amount of raw images. This paper presents the design and implementation of an easy-to-use viewer for astronomical images with user friendly graphic user interface (GUI). Compared to some of the existing tools such as IRAF and Skyview, our developed FITS viewer is more accessible to public users who have little knowledge of astronomy. To achieve good visualization quality, image enhancement technologies is incorporated in the developed software. The effect of the image enhancement can be dynamically adjusted by users through the GUI. Experimental results demonstrated that our developed FITS viewer is an effective and easy to use tool to display and enhance astronomical images.