SAOImage DS9 is the bread-and-butter of almost all astronomers. But I find its UI/UX not very friendly and productive. Maybe the issue lies in with me, but I sometimes wonder if we could do better. I think we can. Not too long ago, I came to know about AstroBurst . I think it is a very cool project and does seem to appear as a potential successor to DS9. Maybe the right thing here for me should be trying to contribute to this. But it already seems to have grown into quite complex piece of software and I don’t consider myself very adept at the technologies involved.
Instead, I want to just try doing my own thing (but still in Rust!). I think recreating what DS9 can do is quite non-trivial. But I think I may learn a lot about image processing along the way which seems like a productive investment of time. I have also never done GUI programming so maybe that’s another cool thing I will be learning.
Also I’m calling it Voyager (the successor to Deep Space Nine).