This command rotates an image. The keywords LEFT, RIGHT and UD are used for simple rotations. These operate on the entire image. The directions LEFT or RIGHT or UD refer to the orientation of the image as seen on the image display or in a contour map. Imagine the image drawn or a piece of paper for these rotations. UD is the same as two LEFT or two RIGHT rotations done in sequence. It does NOT produce the a result which can be done with FLIP. The keyword TRANSPOSE will transpose the image, i.e. change the columns into rows and vice versa; this is equivalent to a ROTATE LEFT plus a FLIP ROWS or a FLIP ROWS plus a ROTATE RIGHT.
Use PA= to specify an arbitrary rotation in degrees. PA=0 is vertical as seen on the television, with positive rotation angles corresponding to a counterclockwise rotation. A box may be specified, in which case the whole image will be rotated around the center of the box, then windowed to fit into the box. The box coordinates should be specified in the ROTATED coordinate frame, not in the original frame. If no box is specified, a box the size and position of the whole image is assumed. Note that in this case some corners may be cut off in the rotated image, while others may be filled with zeros. Arbitrary rotations require interpolation to be done on the data. The default method is bilinear interpolation, but higher accuracy 2-D sinc interpolation will be used if the SINC keyword is given.
Note that RIGHT and PA=90 (for example) are not equivalent. The RIGHT
keyword implies a simple shuffling around of the pixel values, while PA=90
will actually attempt to interpolate the values. Another difference lies
in the way the resulting image is proportioned: PA=90 will result in an
image with the same number of rows and columns as the original, but RIGHT
will result in an image with the number of rows and columns reversed.