FITS archive at NRAO

This is an archive for the Flexible Image Transport System,
the standard data interchange and archival format
of the worldwide astronomy community.

Newcomers to the world of FITS are advised to consult
Overview of the FITS Data Format
and A Primer on the FITS Data Format.
the FITS Support Office web pages are strongly recommended.

The formal documents which define the FITS standard are

Definition of the Flexible Image Transport System (FITS)
[NOST 100-2.0] which was adopted 2000-10-12 by a formal vote of the IAU FITS Working Group and was then published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics. The published paper is available in PDF, compressed Postscript and HTML. The HTML version includes appendices which were omitted in the journal publication. (The PDF version can be viewed with viewers such as the xpdf viewer (included with many Linux distributions) as well as Adobe's acrobat reader.)
Representations of world coordinates in FITS by Greisen and Calabretta (241 Kbyte pdf file from A&A) Accepted: Volume 395, pages 1061-1075
Representations of celestial coordinates in FITS by Calabretta and Greisen (1.22 Mbyte pdf file from A&A), Accepted: Volume 395, pages 1077-1122

(both of these were adopted 2002-12-18 by a formal vote of the IAU-FWG and published in Astronomy & Astrophysics).
Representations of spectral coordinates in FITS by Greisen, Calabretta, Valdes, and Allen (901 Kbyte PDF, or 199 Mbyte gzipped PostScript, or 553 Mbyte PostScript)

MIME media types

Draft RFC updated 2004-03-12

An ad hoc task group led by Steve Allen is developing an 'RFC' which will be used to obtain official MIME media types for FITS. The email exploder fitsmime@nrao.edu (see threads of discussion) is being used for these discussions. To subscribe to fitsmime, fill in the fields in the "Subscribing to fitsmime" section of the fitsmime web page.

WCS proposals

Work on the third FITS World Coordinates System [WCS] proposal "Representations of spectral coordinates in FITS" is nearing completion; see the links at the bottom of Eric Greisen's home-page. Mailing list fitswcs@nrao.edu is being used to facilitate WCS discussions. To subscribe to fitswcs, fill in the fields in the "Subscribing to fitswcs" section of the fitswcs web page.

fitsbits/sci.astro.fits

Public discussion of FITS-related matters
occurs in newsgroup sci.astro.fits (see last 25 threads of discussion). A bi-directional gateway connects newsgroupsci.astro.fits to Email exploder fitsbits@nrao.edu; the traffic content of the two services is identical. To subscribe to fitsbits, fill in the fields in the "Subscribing to fitsbits" section of the fitsbits web page.

FITS material in this archive:

documents -- FITS-related documents
os-support -- code for various environments.
data -- FITS files, in several categories:
- samples -- sample files from facilities/disciplines.
- tests -- collections of FITS files for feature testing.
src -- FITS-related source code
- wcs -- various World Coordinate System sources
traffic -- archives for FITS-related newsgroups & exploders.
wais-source -- searching the FITS document archive.

Other FITS archives are at:

FITS Support Office at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
HEASARC at GSFC -- portable FITS software packages CFITSIO and FTOOLS (W. Pence) ( FITS overview)

Other FITS-related resources are at:

Specifications concerning designations for astronomical radiation sources outside the solar system
FAQ about scientific data formats (including FITS). The author of this FAQ stopped maintaining it five years ago (see Ilana Stern). It is cited here because it is not yet obsolete and because there is not yet any substitute for it.
AstroWeb: Astronomy/Astrophysics resources on the Internet
European Standards for Open Information Interchange
A Summary of the International Standard Date and Time Notation
Metadata and Data Management Info Page

Don Wells (dwells@nrao.edu)
most recent change of this page on 2004-12-02