The Karma Home Page

Please note Karma is maintained now only for portability fixes.
The documents here are for the last ever version of Karma, 1.7.25, and may contain some inaccuracies or anacronisms.

Karma is a toolkit for interprocess communications, authentication, encryption, graphics display, user interface and manipulating the Karma network data structure. It contains KarmaLib (the structured libraries and API) and a large number of modules (applications) to perform many standard tasks.

A suite of visualisation tools is also distributed with the library.

If you have the Karma HTML documentation files installed under /usr/local/karma/www then use that copy, it will be much faster.

For a more detailed description of the Karma Library, read the Karma Library README file.

Karma is freely available and is distributed under the GNU LGPL (libraries) and GPL (applications).

Karma Documentation

User Manual
A prerequisite for using the Karma visualisation tools, also available as a PostScript document.

Programming Manual
Prerequisite for programming with Karma, also available in PostScript.

Reference Manual
Details of the packages and Xt-based widgets that comprise the Karma Library.

Download

Installation instructions are contained in the README file in the Karma ftp area.

Screen shots

• kvis, a general-purpose image/movie viewer that can load multiple datasets, display multiple windows, overlay contours, annotations, show multiple overlaid profiles, and much more.
• koords, for applying a coordinate system header to an image.
• kpvslice, interactively displays position-velocity slices.
• krenzo, displays contours of channel maps.
• kshell, for finding and analysing expanding shells.
• khuei, displays complex or amplitude/phase data using hue and intensity.
• kslice_3d, used to display three orthogonal slices through a volume.

References

Please cite one of the references below if your use of Karma leads to a publication:

• Gooch, R.E., 1995, "Space and the Spaceball", in Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems IV, ASP Conf. Series vol. 77, ed. R.A. Shaw, H.E. Payne, & J.J.E. Hayes, ASP, San Francisco, p144-147, ISBN 0-937707-96-1
• Gooch, R.E., 1995, "Visualisation: from Data to Understanding", in Workshop on Applications of Radio Science 1995, Australian Academy of Science through the National Committee for Radio Science ISBN 1-86408-030-2
• Gooch, R.E., 1996, "Karma: a Visualisation Test-Bed", in Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems V, ASP Conf. Series vol. 101, ed. G.H. Jacoby & J. Barnes, ASP, San Francisco, p80-83, ISSN 1080-7926
• Gooch, R.E., 1995, "Astronomers and their Shady Algorithms", in IEEE Visualisation '95, ed. G.M. Nielson & D. Silver, pub. IEEE, p374-377 ISBN 0-8186-7187-4
• Gooch, R.E., 1996, "Grasping the Wispy Tendrils", in Publications of the Astronomical Society of Australia, vol. 14, no. 1, p106 ISSN 1323-3580