VISTA operates on images or spectra stored in internal memory buffers. Before you are able to analyze an image or a spectrum, you need to load your images into one of the buffers from files on disk. After an image has been loaded into memory, you can copy it to other buffers, or write the data to disk. Below, we will use the word ``image'' to connote both 2-D images and 1-D spectra, since functionally a 1-D spectrum is treated as a 1-D image with only one row of data.
NOTE: Version 5.0 of VISTA does not provide any commands for magnetic tape handling, as magnetic tape as a random access medium has largely become obsolete, having given way to mass disk storage (traditional magnetic disks, optical disks, and CD-ROM media) with multi-gigabyte capacity.
These two commands are used to read and write images:
These commands set the default data directories used by VISTA:
These commands are used to work on image buffers:
These commands work on the headers of images stored in memory: