Subject: Re: FITS to GIF

From: drtr at mail.ast.cam.ac.uk (David Robinson)
Date: 22 Jun 1994 10:10:10 GMT

In article <21JUN199414460167 at nssdca.gsfc.nasa.gov> bschlesinger at nssdca.gsfc.nasa.gov (BARRY M. SCHLESINGER) writes:
>In article <a337ard-200694125448 at pubmac04.amc.uva.nl>, a337ard at horus.sara.nl (ard jonker) writes...
>>In article <2u384f$3ne at darkstar.UCSC.EDU>, amartel at darkstar.ucsc.edu (Le
>>Charognard) wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>>    Is there a way to convert a FITS image to GIF format ? I think I
>>> saw something on this in this newsgroup not too long ago. Thanks.
>>MIRA does read FITS, NIH-IMage can read FITS (if you tell it how: import,
>>swap bytes,x- and y size, and the header size to skip.
>>MIRA= Macintosh program to analyse astronomical images. Shareware or PD,
>>I'm not sure.
>
>N. B.  Many of these programs can process only a subset of FITS data 
>arrays.  Not all can handle NAXIS !=2 or IEEE-754 floating point 
>data.  See the FITS basics and information posting on sci.astro.fits 
>for a start.

I have produced some patches to add fits support to the xv-3.00a image
display program. It allows you to convert to/from GIF, PM, PBM, X11 bitmap,
Sun Rasterfile, BMP, PostScript, IRIS, JPEG and TIFF.

It can handle IEE-754 floating point data on all host machines (including
Vaxes and 64-bit architectures) and supports NAXIS=2 or 3. The only signifcant
non-portability assumption is the use of the ASCII character set.

The patches can be ftp'd from
ftp-hst.ast.cam.ac.uk:/pub/software/xv-patches/FITS-v2.tar.Z

N.B. xv is only shareware for personal use. One day I might get round to
contributing these to the netpbm release.

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

[Cross posted to sci.astro.fits for the benefit of the fits folk. Followups
 to sci.image.processing only, please]