Subject: Re: FITS HELP

From: [email-masked] (Timothy Banks)
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 1991 03:31:53 GMT

In article <[email-masked]> [email-masked] (Malcolm Porter) writes:
>
> Can anyone help?
>      I have some FITS files. What is their format? 
>

I think that this is covered in the FAQ. The papers that define FITS are:

	- "FITS : a Flexible Image Transport System", D.C.Wells et al, 
	  Astronomy and Astrophysics Supplement Series, 44, 1981, 363-370.
	- "Generalized extensions and blocking factors for FITS", P.Grosbol
	  et al., Astronomy and Astrophys. Suppl. ser 73, 1988, 359-364.
	- "The FITS tables extension", R.H.Harten et al., Astron. Astrophys.
	   Suppl. Ser, 73, 1988, 365 - 372.
	- "An extension of FITS for groups of small arrays of data", E.W.
	   Griesen and R.H.Harten, Astron. Astrophys. Suppl. Ser., 44, 1981,
	   371-374.

A PBMPLUS toolkit is avaliable at amccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca [130.113.1.1],
while a good viewer for FITS is SAOimage, which runs under Unix/X windows
and is avalaible by anonftp from iear.arts.rpi.edu in pub/astro or
cfa250.harvard.edu in /pub/saoimage. FITS documentation, including the draft
FITS standard presented at the recent IAU General Assembly Commission Five
Working Group, can be found at 128.183.10.4 in /FITS or 192.33.115.8 in
/FITS/doc. The Goddard Space flight Centre has a FITS table browser. FITSIO,
a set of Fortran 77 subroutines for reading or writing data files in FITS
format is avaliable at 128.183.8.77.

Ofcourse, you can always try the group alt.sci.astro.fits for advice! Dr
Wells is also floating about this group....and was very helpful when I was
learning about FITS.

-- 
Timothy Banks, Physics Department, Victoria University of Wellington, NZ.
  [email-masked], [email-masked], [email-masked]
         [email-masked], [email-masked] 
  "He's dead, Jim!" "OK, you take the tricorder, I'll take the wallet!"