Added proposal to modify ds9 to work with ASDF files.

finance/proposal-calls/cycle5/asdf-python-ds9.md

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+### Title Making DS9 more accessible to ASDF and Python
+
+### Project Team
+
+- Perry Greenfield: Approximately 27 years of scientific python programming
+  experience; 50 years of astronomical data reduction experience, 40 years at
+  STScI (now retired), former Branch Lead of Science Software Branch;
+  involved in all major Python data analysis and calibration projects at
+  STScI. Part of the original organizing of astropy. Involved in the creation
+  of ASDF (Advanced Scientific Data Format)
+
+### Project Description
+The Advanced Scientific Data Format (ASDF) was
+developed to address shortcomings of the FITS format, like serializing
+complex WCS transformations or dealing with newer types of
+instrumentation (IFS, MSA), that FITS is effectively incapable of
+handling (Thomas, B., Jenness. T. et al. (2015)). A Python library was
+developed to implement the standard. 
+
+Currently astropy makes use of ASDF for serialization of a number of objects,
+models, tables and coordinate frames as examples. To help wider adoption of
+ASDF by the community, and thus the serialization of astropy objects, it is
+important that astronomers have a convenient way of displaying images within
+their most used image display tool, namely ds9. Unfortunately STScI is
+unwilling to provide such support. I am proposing to add such support to ds9,
+as well as making integration of general python tools more easily accessible
+from ds9 than they currently are.
+
+The integration will proceed in steps.
+
+1. ds9 provides a means of execution of python code, albeit in a somewhat
+awkward manner. Some years past I have developed such a facility for
+displaying ASDF images in ds9, though it was never carried through to being
+released due to a lack of support from STScI. This first step is to make this
+capability available. 
+
+2. The second step is to make the instrinsic ds9 GUI
+naturally accept ASDF files as easeily as it uses FITS files. This initially
+does not require changes to the internals of ds9, particularly with regard
+to its user interface. This is because there are mechanisms for ds9 to
+dynamically load new GUI elements from TCL extensions provided by others.
+(See https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2005ASPC..347..114C/abstract for
+an overview; in addition, the following repository contains examples of
+how this is done. The hope is that with the successful addition of the
+enhancements, the ds9 development team will find it easy to fold these
+into the ds9 codebase.
+
+3. Expand the ds9 interface to allow introspection
+within an ASDF file showing where images are located so they can be selected
+with the cursor. Initially does not need internal changes to ds9.
+
+4. The previous steps can be generalized to allow a
+mechanism to extend the ds9 interface to handle access to other python
+tools. Likewise probably does not require internal changes to ds9
+
+5. ds9 currently only understands FITS WCS information. I plan to
+modify it to also work with the python GWCS library. Note the previous steps
+bypass this by approximating the GWCS with a SIP fit to the GWCS model).
+There is a subtlety that must be dealt with that affects performance since it
+will likely be necessary to change the event handling when using GWCS to make
+it perform acceptably.
+
+This proposal intends
+to limit the work to the funds requested. I expect that the first 3 steps
+should be achieved; those beyond depend on the difficutly of 2 and 3. 
+Item 5 is considered a stretch goal and requires integration into ds9.
+
+### Approximate Budget I am requesting budget in the range of $18,000 to $22,000 to perform this work
+    (approximately 133 hours at $150/hr)
+
+### Period of Performance The work will be completed within a year
+    (2026-01-01 to 2026-12-31)
+