Subject: Re: FITS to GIF format

From: bschlesinger at nssdca.gsfc.nasa.gov (BARRY M. SCHLESINGER)
Date: 21 Apr 1994 14:46 EDT

>>In article <2p3t59$3os at news.u.washington.edu> aberman at u.washington.edu (Andrew
>>Berman) writes:
>>>Is there some program somewhere that will
>>>convert a FITS file to GIF or JPG format?
>>>

One point that has not been mentioned in any of the answers to this 
question on sci.astro is any limits on the kinds of FITS files the 
programs can handle.  Many are unable to handle values of NAXIS, the 
number of axes in the FITS array, other than 2.  Additional axes are
often used when the same object is observed at different wavelengths
or polarizations.  Also, not all can handle every FITS data type:
unsigned 8-bit integers, signed 16- and 32- bit integers, and IEEE-754
32-bit and 64-bit floating point.  Citations of particular software
packages should any such limitation in these areas. 

sci.astro.fits added to newsgroup header.

				Barry Schlesinger
				NSSDC/NOST FITS Support Office

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From: drtr at mail.ast.cam.ac.uk (David Robinson)
Date: 22 Apr 1994 11:43:14 GMT

>packages should any such limitation in these areas. 

FITS support is available for the xv-3.00a image display program.
This allows it to read and write fits files, and hence convert to/from
GIF,PM,PBM,X11 bitmap, Sun rasterfile, BMP, PostScript, IRIS, JPEG and
TIFF files.

It can display files with NAXIS being 2 or 3; for 3-dimensional fits files
the dataset is divided into NAXIS3 sub-images. All BITPIX values are supported.
HISTORY and COMMENT keywords will be presevered when converting to/from fits
files if the source/destination format supports commentary data.

To my knowledge the code has been used under Vax VMS 5.5, Univel SVR4.2,
hp-ux 8.07, SunOs 4 and SunOs 5.

The patches to xv can be fetched by anonymous ftp from the file
pub/software/xv-patches/FITS-v2.tar.Z at ftp-hst.ast.cam.ac.uk.
It should be unpacked in the xv-3.00a source directory.

David Robinson. (drtr at mail.ast.cam.ac.uk)