July 2004 Included with the WMAP IDL distribution is the program MAPVIEW, which provides an interactive image display for viewing WMAP HealPix FITS files. In order for users without an IDL license to use this program, we also make it available for use with the IDL "Virtual Machine". The use of MAPVIEW with the IDL virtual machine remains cumbersome because it requires that the entire IDL distribution (~270 Mb) be downloaded. In the future, we plan to have MAPVIEW-like capabilities available on the Web. (1) Download the MAPVIEW virtual machine files from this page, as either a tar file or a zip file. Included will be the mapview.sav binary file, as well as necessary HealPix lookup tables in a /ref/luts/heal subdirectory. (2) If you do not already have the IDL virtual machine, it must be downloaded by following the links for your particular machine (Mac, Windows, PC-Unix or Unix) at http://www.rsinc.com/idlvm/ (3) The /ref subdirectory containing the subdirectories with the HealPix lookup tables must be defined as MAP_REF. For example, if the current directory is /home/user/wmap , then MAP_REF can be defined as follows: setenv MAP_REF /home/user/wmap/ref Users on WINDOWS machines should set this environment variable by going to the Control Panel --> System Properties -- Advanced. (4) Start mapview.sav simply by double-clicking (on Windows machines), or from the Unix prompt by typing idl -vm=mapview.sav