Software and Sample Data
Table of Contents
HEASARC is the High Energy
Science Archive Research Center at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.
FITSIO
Home page
The FITSIO package, maintained by W. D. Pence, is a machine-independent
subroutine interface for reading or writing data files in FITS format.
It is composed of portable subroutines that allow the programmer
to read, write, and modify FITS files without having to deal with the
details of the file structure. Separate libraries are available for use
with programs written in FORTRAN-77 and ANSI-C. It runs on most
commonly used computers; a list is available at the FITSIO site.
FITSIO supports all the standard FITS extensions and the
multidimensional and variable length array binary tables conventions.
It contains world coordinates subroutines for conversion between pixel
and celestial coordinates. In addition, software support for the
checksum proposal is available.
FTOOLS Web site -- Lots of documentation available there.
The FTOOLS package of FITS utility programs was developed by J. K.
Blackburn and W. D. Pence and is now maintained by the
FTOOLS
team. It is a collection of over 200 ANSI Fortran or ANSI C
utility programs, Perl scripts, and Tcl scripts that operate on FITS
files. A graphical interface is available. New versions are released
about every 3 months. Users have the option of installing the entire
FTOOLS package, which includes many routines specific to high energy
astrophysics, or a core set that contains only the routines that
perform general operations on FITS files. FTOOLS can be built either
as a set of stand-alone executable tasks or as a package within IRAF
(currently tested only under Sun Solaris systems).
FTOOLS is regularly installed on the following platforms:
Unix or similar: ALPHA/OSF, DEC/Ultrix, Linux, SUN/SunOS, SUN/Solaris,
HP/HP-UXm, SGI/IRIX
VMS: ALPHA/VMS, VAX/VMS.
Send questions or comments to
ftoolshelp@athena.gsfc.nasa.gov
Additional information about compatibility for other platforms can be
found at the FTOOLS Web site.
Detailed
information and retrieval
The fv FITS file viewer and editor is included as a standard part of
the FTOOLS distribution and is available as a standalone package as
well. It has a graphical user interface. Features include
- Image display with pan, zoom, and color table manipulation
- Editing of FITS header keywords and data values
- Summary window listing contents and size of all extensions
- Production of line plots of the values in two or more columns of a
FITS table, with export to a PostScript file.
It is currently supported on many Unix platforms; Windows and
Macintosh versions are under development.
ftp
directory where VERIFITS FITS conformance verifier can be found.
There is a
README
file.
W. D. Pence (GSFC/HEASARC) has announced the VERIFITS program to verify
the conformance to the standard of any FITS format disk data file,
checking keywords and data. At user option it will list the total
number of pixels, the number of null pixels and the maximum and
minimum data values. If an error is found while evaluating the
header, validation ceases, the error is reported, and the first 72
keywords of the header are listed. While VERIFITS has been extensively
tested, under some unusual circumstances not covered by the tests it
may still fail to detect a FITS format error, or it may issue an error
message that does not accurately describe the problem.
The VERIFITS program is a stand-alone version of the fverify task that
is included in the IRAF or Host FTOOLS package. Both VERIFITS and
fverify perform the same verification checks, but fverify has a nicer
user interface, as provided by the IRAF or Host environments. Several
different binary executable versions of VERIFITS are available, for
running on Sun workstations, DECstations, DEC Alphas running OSF/1 or
VAX/VMS machines. The VERIFITS source code is also provided and may be
easily linked with the FITSIO library to run on the other types of
machine on which FITSIO is supported.
Information and retrieval
The European Southern Observatory
ESO C Library for an Image
Processing Software Environment (eclipse) is an ANSI C library for
astronomical image processing. It was developed with the Adaptive
Optics system (Adonis) on the 3.6 m ESO telescope in mind and was
designed for processing infrared data, but most of its algorithms have
a more general applicability. It provides software tools for image
calibration, cleaning, and analysis.
Instructions for use and downloading
Available for MS-DOS and Unix
The GSFC Astronomical Data Center FITS Table Browser has been tailored
specifically for use with the ADC CD-ROMs but may be used with other
FITS ASCII Tables. It reads standard FITS ASCII tables and allows the
user to browse through them interactively and selectively display any
field or record in a table. File extraction facilities allow the
writing of all or part of the input table to disk in FITS or text file
format.
Information and retrieval
- Still under construction
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications
(NCSA) Hierarchical Data
Format (HDF) group is
developing a FITS server-side browser as part of its overall HDF
Scientific Data Browser. It provides access to FITS files on a server
by creating HTML versions, which can be viewed easily with common web
browsers. Among the things it does now are the following:
- Retrieve the images from a FITS file
- View a group of planes from a 3-d image
- Get summary information from the primary or all headers
- Create an HTML table from an ASCII or binary table.
Use requires the following:
Because development is still in progress, the only separate
documentation is the
README.
Information
and retrieval instructions.
Some properties of the prototype:
- Displays FITS ASCII or binary table as HTML table
- Uses Java applet to display images in a new frame, including
animation of planes from 3-D images
- Displays header or summary information
The IDL Astronomy
User's Library
- A central repository for general purpose astronomy procedures
written in IDL.
- A collection of procedures from which users can select, not meant
to be an integrated package.
- Submitted procedures are given a cursory testing but are basically
stored in the library as submitted.
- Includes FITS I/O software, including procedures to convert
between spherical coordinates and plane map coordinates.
W. Landsman (Hughes STX;
(landsman@stars.gsfc.nasa.gov)
is the contact.
Disclaimer: The mention of particular software packages
is not intended as an endorsement of those packages to the exclusion of
others. Information about publicly available nonproprietary packages
is welcome and will be added to this Web site if the package appears
relevant and useful. Such information should include how to obtain the
package and whom to contact with questions. It should also describe any
limits on the FITS files that the package can handle (e. g., NAXIS must
be 2; data array members must be integers). Commercial packages for
which there is a licensing fee or other charge will be mentioned only
if they perform an important function and there is no alternative.
Part 2 of the
Graphics
FILE Format FAQ, Image Conversion and Display Programs, describes
how to display images in many formats, including FITS, on different
hardware, and also discusses how to convert an image from one format
to another.
The three major astronomical image analysis packages
- the Astronomical Image Processing System
(AIPS),
developed by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory
(NRAO)
- the European Southern Observatory
Munich Image and Data Analysis System
(ESO-MIDAS),
- the Image Reduction and Analysis Facility
(IRAF), developed by the
National Optical Astronomy Observatories
(NOAO)
provide facilities for displaying images stored in FITS files. These
packages are large and probably best installed on major systems.
NRAO has developed the FITSview family of FITS viewers and made them
available at no cost for a variety of computing platforms. Among the
features supported are
- All defined FITS data types
- Blanked pixels
- Viewing of two- and three-dimensional FITS images
- Direct reading of gzip-compressed files
- Determination of celestial positions using world coordinate
projections (WCS).
Extensive on-line documentation is included. The FITSview family
includes the following products:
FITSview
FITSview
runs on Windows 3.1 and Windows 95. It is available in either
text
or
gzipped
format. It uses any multicolor (or multiple gray level) display,
although 256-color displays give the best results.
MacFITSView
MacFITSview
runs on Apple Macintosh computers and should run under
System 7.0 and later. The executable for the Power PC is
MacFITSview.PPC and that for older Macs is
MacFITSview.68k. 256-color displays give the best results. Test
FITS files are also included.
XFITSview
XFITSview runs on Unix/X-Windows systems and requires the use of
Motif. This version is distributed as source with binaries for
selected systems. A
gzipped
.tar archive contains the sources for building XFITSview for
different platforms.
Retrieve
the SAO R&D Software Suite as a compressed .tar file.
The unpacked .tar file requires approximately 45 Mbytes of disk space;
the build will require approximately double that amount.
The SAO R&D Software Suite consists of several cooperating
software tools. SAOimage: The Next Generation (SAOtng)
is a new version of the X11 display tool SAOimage, developed by the
Smithsonian
Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) and NOAO. SAOtng can be used to
display FITS or IRAF images stand-alone or with the ASSIST graphical
user interface to IRAF and other user environments under the X-Windows
system. SAOtng also allows users to incorporate calls to SAOimage into
their own processing and analysis packages, as an alternative to using
it as a stand-alone package.
The SAO R&D Software Suite has been developed under SUNOS and
Solaris; ports (with minimal testing) have been done to the SGI,
HP9000s700, and Dec Alpha. See the BUILD, STARTING.ASSIST, and
STARTING.SAOTNG documents contained in the .tar file for more
information on build and use requirements.
Questions about the use of the SAO R&D Software Suite may be
sent to
saotng@cfa.harvard.edu
or
assist@cfa.harvard.edu
The
netPBM
package is a revised version of the Extended Portable Bitmap Toolkit
(pbm+). It is not "official" in the sense of having been released by
the original author, but he has approved the idea of a net-supported
version. It is a collection of code from various sources around the
world.
The netPBM package will run on Unix, MS-DOS, VMS, and Amiga systems
and other systems with C compilers and redirectable output, and it
requires significant amounts of real or virtual address space. It can
be used to convert many FITS files to image format. However, support
is not guaranteed for all FITS files where the data are in the form of
an image. According to its documentation, it ignores all axes beyond
the third, characterizes its support for IEEE floating point format as
"more or less", and states, "Will only work on machines that
understand IEEE-754." Further details can be found in the fitstopnm.c
and fitstopnm.1 files.
IMDISP
is a command-driven interactive image processing program that runs
on an IBM PC computer and supports FITS input. Version 7.9e is
distributed by
NSSDC as
unsupported software.
Manchester Scientific Instruments has a
freeware FITS
viewer for primary HDUs available for 32-bit and 16-bit Windows (no longer
supported). The software for Windows is provided in zipped form.
There is also an alpha release of a Linux version; the software is
gzipped and the source code is also tarred. Extensions are not
currently supported. There are README files for both the
Windows
and
Linux
versions.
D. Norton of Otter Solution has written a Photoshop plug in for use
with NIH Image
(binhex
form) called PhotoFits which reads 8-, 16-, or 32-bit
integer and 32- or 64- bit floating point FITS images of two or more
dimensions and converts them to 8-bit or RGB images. It allows
conversion of three-image FITS files to RGB. It allows multiple image
files to be read in as a mosaic. There is a
README
file at NIH that discusses all the Photoshop plugins. Questions and
problem reports should be sent to ottersol@aol.com.
The site at NRAO contains a
collection
of Usenet postings and electronic mail messages about the
use of FITS on Macintosh hardware.
The ANSI C functions worldpos( ) and xypix( ) convert (RA,dec) < -->
pixel location for 8 common types of projective geometries where
(RA,Dec) are more generically (long,lat). These functions are based on
the World Coordinates implementation of Classic AIPS.
WCSLIB is a suite of routines
which implements the spherical projections for the
proposed World Coordinate System (WCS)
convention for FITS. The WCSLIB distribution kit contains
independent C and FORTRAN implementations of the library.
The WCSTools package from the Harvard-Smithsonian
Center for Astrophysics is a
set of programs for setting and using world coordinate system
information that supports FITS. It includes standalone C programs for
setting the world coordinate system of an astronomical image using a
reference star catalog or created by software from the Digitized Sky
Survey. Other programs manipulate FITS headers and use the header
information to transform between image and sky coordinates. These
routines are the same as those used in SAOtng.
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications
(NCSA) is
developing conversion utilities between FITS and Hierarchical Data Format
(HDF). Two utilities are
available; one converts HDF Scientific Data Sets (SDSs) to FITS and
the other converts FITS to SDS format.
These test files
consist of several modifications of one FITS file:
- One in conformance with the FITS standard and recommended practices
- Several with header errors, of different kinds
- Two in technical conformance but with features that might
cause problems for some readers
They are useful for testing the ability of FITS reading software to
cope with erroneous or unusual files and to identify correctly the
errors encountered. When downloading the files use ftp and binary
transfer. Web downloads will often render the files incorrectly as
text.
This collection of files was created by Preben Grosbøl for testing
the ability of FITS readers to read all standard FITS constructs
including primary HDUs, TABLE, IMAGE, and
BINTABLE extensions, and IEEE floating point data,
including the special values. The file with IEEE special values is
comprehensive and an excellent test of the ability of a FITS reader to
handle IEEE floating point.
Directory
containing files
In spite of the name, these files are on-line. The name
FITS Test Tape is historical, as the files were originally
on a tape. Among the examples are a file that is pure text, a random
groups format file, and a file with special records after the primary
HDU. In addition to the files, the directory includes documentation
in PostScript and LaTeX.
HEASARC provides a number of
FITS
files produced/stored by the
Office
of Guest Investigator Programs (OGIP) that illustrate the formats
used, in particular, the recommendations and conventions approved by
the
HEASARC
FITS Working Group (HFWG).
ftp
directory containing files.
This directory contains a number of files that use the
new format endorsed by the
IAU FITS Working Group
for DATExxxx keywords, which includes a four-digit year and
provision for time as well as date. They provide an opportunity to test
the ability of FITS readers to understand the new format.
Related Material
The FITS Support Office is hosted by the
HEASARC
(High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center)
(Electronic Mail) fits @ fits.gsfc.nasa.gov
(Telephone) +1-301-286-4599
Last revised: 12 September 2002
Responsible NASA representative: Dr. William D. Pence