Subject: Re: FITS viewer for Mac?

From: gwc at alpha1.csd.uwm.edu (Greg F Walz Chojnacki)
Date: 4 Apr 1994 14:30:28 GMT

>From article <CnJ8z0.5sA at isosa2.estec.esa.nl>, by rverscho at isosa2.estec.esa.nl (Rob Verschoor):
> In sci.astro.fits you write:
> 
>>The subject line says it all: I'm looking for a utility for viewing -- and,
>>ideally, manipulating, at least rudimentarily, FITS image files.
> 
> There's no such thing as a 'FITS' viewer. FITS is a convention for formatting 
> any kind of data in a transportable format. A FITS viewer would therefore be 
> about as meaningful as an 'ISAM' file viewer: not at all. FITS data can be 
> anything : spectra, images, whatever. 

Just to make sure that others reading this aren't discouraged, I want to
point out that there are indeed programs for viewing images encoded using
the FITS standard. To wit:

For PCs
	IMDISP
	VIEWFITS (OS/2)
For Macs
	NIH-Image
	Maia

There are also FITS file browsers, which I take to be useful for examining
FITS data files and the like. I haven't used them, however, and won't
comment further.

Greg