From S46@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de Thu Oct 24 15:54:03 1991 Newsgroups: sci.astro From: S46@vm.urz.uni-heidelberg.de (GUNNAR RADONS) Subject: Re: FITS image file Organization: University of Heidelberg, Germany Date: Tue, 22 Oct 91 18:18:16 CET In article <1991Oct21.191359.18477@eecs.nwu.edu> minky@epsilon.eecs.nwu.edu (Moon Gi Kang) writes: >Does somebody outthere has any information about >the way to convert FITS image files to another >type format of images?... > Rehi, the easiest way to do is: Display the image, grab it with the grabber of your favourite graphics editor and then load that grabbed file and save it in any format that you like. If you like to do it rhe hard way, then ftp (if you have access to it) to the anonymous account at the nrao (fits.cx.nrao.edu or 191.33.115.8), go to the fitsio subdirectory and grab the fitsio package (it's written in FORTRAN). Then you may write your own FITS to something conversion utility. Bye, Gunnar From boily@perseus.phy.ulaval.ca Thu Oct 24 15:54:08 1991 From: boily@perseus.phy.ulaval.ca (Edouard Boily) Newsgroups: sci.astro Subject: Re: FITS image file Date: 22 Oct 91 23:23:18 GMT Organization: Universite Laval, Ste-Foy, Quebec (Canada) In article <1991Oct21.191359.18477@eecs.nwu.edu> minky@epsilon.eecs.nwu.edu (Moon Gi Kang) writes: >Hi, > >Does somebody outthere has any information about >the way to convert FITS image files to another >type format of images? >(I got some astronomical images and >want to do image processing, but >I have never used FITS) >Any other format(gif, raster, rawbinary, FBM TIFF and so on) >will be ok with me. > >Thank you in advance for your rapid response. > >-moon- I recommend pbmplus. It can convert from a great deal of formats, including FITS to the same deal of formats (including the one you want). pbmplus is free (PD) and available at a lot of anonymous ftp sites. The latest version is dated Oct05. - Edouard .---------------------------------------------------------. | boily@phy.ulaval.ca | |---------------------------------------------------------| | Edouard Boily | Projects: AmiGraph, AmigIRAF | | Physic's Dept. | Interests: Astronomy, Comp. Sciences | | Laval Univ. | Work: On my Ph. D. _ // | | Quebec, CANADA | Citation: Not yet! \X/ | `---------------------------------------------------------' From warnock@nssdca.gsfc.nasa.gov Thu Oct 24 15:54:11 1991 From: warnock@nssdca.gsfc.nasa.gov (Archie Warnock) Newsgroups: sci.astro Subject: Re: FITS image file Date: 24 Oct 91 16:55:00 GMT Organization: ST Systems Corp. - NASA/NCDS News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41 Nntp-Posting-Host: nssdca.gsfc.nasa.gov In article <1991Oct22.232318.19102@cerberus.ulaval.ca>, boily@perseus.phy.ulaval.ca (Edouard Boily) writes... > I recommend pbmplus. It can convert from a great deal of >formats, including FITS to the same deal of formats (including the one Last version I saw of pbmplus only handled FITS format for 8-bit images. IMDISP will also handle 16-bit integer images, but not floating point (yet). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Archie Warnock Internet: warnock@nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov -- Hughes STX SPAN: NSSDC::WARNOCK -- NASA/GSFC "Unix - JCL for the 90s" From awootten@polaris.cv.nrao.edu Thu Oct 24 15:54:16 1991 Newsgroups: sci.astro From: awootten@polaris.cv.nrao.edu (Al Wootten) Subject: Re: FITS image file In-Reply-To: minky@epsilon.eecs.nwu.edu's message of Mon, 21 Oct 1991 19: 13:59 GMT Organization: National Radio Astronomy Observatory Date: Wed, 23 Oct 1991 15:03:44 GMT >In article <1991Oct21.191359.18477@eecs.nwu.edu> minky@epsilon.eecs.nwu.edu (Moon Gi Kang) writes: > Does somebody outthere has any information about > the way to convert FITS image files to another > type format of images? If you are using a PC, imdisp77 from ames.arc.nasa.gov will accept/write FITS format (NAXIS=2 and 16 bits) and gif or vicar formats. It will allow you to do a lot of image processing, too. -- +--------------------------------------------__---------+ | Alwyn Wootten \/ | | National Radio Astronomy Observatory ^ | | 520 Edgemont Road, Charlottesville, VA 22903-2475, USA| | | | awootten@nrao.edu awootten@nrao.bitnet | | 6654::awootten (SPAN) Let's build The Millimeter Array| | (804)-296-0329 {> {> {> {> | +------------------------------^-----^-----^-----^------+ From minky@epsilon.eecs.nwu.edu Fri Oct 25 09:22:47 1991 Newsgroups: sci.astro From: minky@epsilon.eecs.nwu.edu (Moon Gi Kang) Subject: Re: FITS image file Organization: EECS Department, Northwestern University Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1991 02:33:30 GMT In article <24OCT199111555638@nssdca.gsfc.nasa.gov> warnock@nssdca.gsfc.nasa.gov (Archie Warnock) writes: >In article <1991Oct22.232318.19102@cerberus.ulaval.ca>, boily@perseus.phy.ulaval.ca (Edouard Boily) writes... >> I recommend pbmplus. It can convert from a great deal of >>formats, including FITS to the same deal of formats (including the one > >Last version I saw of pbmplus only handled FITS format for 8-bit images. >IMDISP will also handle 16-bit integer images, but not floating point >(yet). > >---------------------------------------------------------------------------- >-- Archie Warnock Internet: warnock@nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov >-- Hughes STX SPAN: NSSDC::WARNOCK >-- NASA/GSFC "Unix - JCL for the 90s" YES, I tried to use pbmplus to convert FITS to another format, but unfortunately, my data is 16-bit integer format. And one more unfortunate thing is, my machine is not IBMpc but Sun work station(spark1). I guess IMDISP is for DOS. Is there any powerful package to convert my data to another format? -moon- PS: So, I made my own program to remove the head of FITS and then converting it to 8bit binary data in IDL. From matt@physics16.berkeley.edu Fri Oct 25 09:27:08 1991 Newsgroups: sci.physics,sci.astro From: matt@physics16.berkeley.edu (Matt Austern) Subject: Fang Li Zhi's work on cosmology Reply-To: matt@physics.berkeley.edu Organization: Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory (Theoretical Physics Group) Distribution: sci Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1991 06:20:09 GMT In article <2476@mpirbn.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de> p515dfi@mpirbn.mpifr-bonn.mpg.de (Daniel Fischer) writes: > The following is translated from an article in the THUERINGER TAGEBLATT of 17 > June 1991 that dealt with the Very Large Array run in Socorro, New Mexico: > ] The well-known Chinese astrophysicist Fang Li Zhi raised the > ] question of the limits of the universe when he met with 30 > ] scientists in Socorro recently for an exchange of thoughts. Fang, > ] who as a dissident had to escape from China and is doing research > ] now at the University of Princeton, said, that the UNIVERSE > ] PERHAPS ISN'T INFINITE BUT LIMITED TO A DIAMETER OF 2*10^9 LIGHT > ] YEARS [emphasis mine]. He opined that some stellar clusters at the > ] end of the visible spectrum needn't to be real objects but could > ] be 'duplicates', mirror images of other galaxies. > That's it! Anyone knowing details of Fang's claim, data, references > in the literature? Sounds like an attempted compromise between an > Arp/van Flandrian and a standard universe to me :-) I attended a talk by Fang about six months or so ago where he discussed his work on this question. Bear in mind that my recollection is not necessarily accurate, and also bear in mind that what he said six months ago is not necessarily what he believes now. Anyway... the point of Fang's talk wasn't so much that he had a particular model for the universe. (Nor was his point the possibility that the universe might be finite; this is one of the standard possibilities of the Big Bang model, after all.) What Fang observed is that most discussions of the Big Bang model assume that the universe is simply connected, in a topological sense. However, there isn't really much reason for that assumption. Non-trivial topologies are perfectly consistent with the Einstein field equations, and most people ignore them just for the sake of simplicity. The topology of the universe is probably determined in the regime in which quantum gravity is important, so we have no way, at this point, of even thinking about what kind of topology is most likely. Once the evolution of the universe proceeds according to classical gravity, of course, the topology is fixed. (He waved around a couple of path integrals over different topologies. You're welcome to believe that sort of thing if you like, but I don't.) The spirit of the talk wasn't "I believe that the universe isn't simply connected," but "in the absence of convincing evidence for a particular topology, let's think about the alternatives." The remainder of the talk, then, was mainly devoted to discussing what the observable consequences of a nontrivial topology would be. And, indeed, one of those consequences was that astronomical objects would be duplicated. Observing this duplication, however, wouldn't be simple: you would have to do some rather complicated statistical tests on large data samples of galaxies, correcting for various kinds of uncertainties. At the time of the talk I attended, Fang wasn't very certain of his results; he did this work by performing numerical simulations, and he did it when he was holed up in the American Embassy. Not surprisingly, the diplomats didn't have computers that were very useful for large-scale scientific computing. One point he made that I found interesting was that in a universe with a nontrivial topology, it is likely that the inhomogeneity in matter would be much greater than the inhomogeneity in radiation. (Which, perhaps, is what we are seeing.) Although I found this remark interesting, I also don't understand it, and I didn't have a chance to ask Fang for an explanation. Does anyone out there understand why this would be the case? X -- Matthew Austern I dreamt I was being followed by a roving band of (415) 644-2618 of young Republicans, all wearing the same suit, matt@physics.berkeley.edu taunting me and shouting, "Politically correct austern@theorm.lbl.gov multiculturist scum!"... They were going to make austern@lbl.bitnet me kiss Jesse Helms's picture when I woke up. From warnock@nssdca.gsfc.nasa.gov Fri Oct 25 10:14:21 1991 From: warnock@nssdca.gsfc.nasa.gov (Archie Warnock) Newsgroups: sci.astro Subject: Re: FITS image file Date: 25 Oct 91 14:25:00 GMT Organization: ST Systems Corp. - NASA/NCDS News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41 Nntp-Posting-Host: nssdca.gsfc.nasa.gov In article <1991Oct25.023330.6474@eecs.nwu.edu>, minky@epsilon.eecs.nwu.edu (Moon Gi Kang) writes... >And one more unfortunate thing is, my machine is not IBMpc >but Sun work station(spark1). I guess IMDISP is for DOS. Yep - sure is, and pretty hardware specific, at that (for those of you thinking you might convert it to other platforms). >Is there any powerful package to convert my data to another format? >PS: So, I made my own program to remove the head of FITS >and then converting it to 8bit binary data in IDL. You seem to have answered your own question - that would have been my answer, too. There are libraries of IDL procedures for reading/writing FITS, though, so the first step wasn't really necessary. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- -- Archie Warnock Internet: warnock@nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov -- Hughes STX SPAN: NSSDC::WARNOCK -- NASA/GSFC "Unix - JCL for the 90s" From sterner@warper.jhuapl.edu Fri Oct 25 13:54:31 1991 From: sterner@warper.jhuapl.edu (Ray Sterner) Newsgroups: sci.astro Subject: Re: FITS image file Date: 25 Oct 91 16:52:02 GMT Organization: Johns Hopkins University minky@epsilon.eecs.nwu.edu (Moon Gi Kang) writes: . . . >PS: So, I made my own program to remove the head of FITS >and then converting it to 8bit binary data in IDL. Users of the computer language IDL may be interested in a library of IDL routines that is available by anonymous ftp. It has about 400 routines and includes a set that deal with FITS files. They allow simple FITS files to be created and read. There are also several other routines of astronomical interest. Accessing the ftp site ---------------------- ftp 128.244.147.14 (fermi.jhuapl.edu) For Name type: anonymous For Password type anything. Change directory by typing: cd idl-pvwave/jhuapl To get a file type: get filename When finished type: bye. Two files of interest are: README = describes what is in the ftp site and how to get it. cat.one = one line descriptions of the IDL routines by category. Those of you that don't know about the IDL computer language may want to check it out. Its a high level, interpreted language that is very strong on graphics and imaging. It has many efficient array operations built-in, so just because it is an interpreter doesn't mean its slow. It runs on most workstations and will soon be on DOS machines and Macs. I have run an evaluation copy on a Compaq 386/25Mhz machine and was very happy with it. If you don't know about it its worth checking. You can get a copy over the net to try for 30 days (I don't know what you do for documention). Ray Sterner sterner%str.decnet@warper.jhuapl.edu Johns Hopkins University North latitude 39.16 degrees. Applied Physics Laboratory West longitude 76.90 degrees. Laurel, MD 20723-6099 From ron@argus.lpl.Arizona.EDU Sun Oct 27 20:33:57 1991 From: ron@argus.lpl.Arizona.EDU (Ron Watkins) Newsgroups: sci.astro Subject: Re: FITS image file Date: 27 Oct 91 14:31:53 GMT Organization: Lunar and Planetary Lab, U of AZ Well, This may not be the easy way out, but you could put IRAF on your SUN host. We use it all the time for image processing and it has image display tools and powerful graphics, fitting, and other I/P functions all astronom- ically related. It will read fits into internal IMAGE format using 'rfits' and 'wfits' and can display with a variety of grey-scales and pseudo-colors. Contact: jbarnes@noao.edu OR iraf@noao.edu ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Ron Watkins ron@argus.lpl.arizona.edu 931 Gould-Simpson (602) 621-8606 University of Arizona Tucson, AZ. 85712