Subject: Re: FOLLOW UP: What I am using FITs for . . .

From: edgar at oldstyle.astro.wisc.edu (Dick Edgar)
Date: 10 May 1995 13:15:07 GMT

In article <3optbv$dvp at mssly3.mssl.ucl.ac.uk> Steve Welch <sjw> writes:
!Earlier I posted a msg asking for information about any FITs ftp sites.  Thanks
!to Donald C Wells for his swift reply and suggestion of 
!
!http://fits.cv.nrao.edu/  and  ftp://fits.cv.nrao.edu/fits/
!
!Donald suggested that I post more details about what I am doing - so for
!general interest, and in case anyone else has done anything similar . . .
!	

snip...

!
!Now for FITs . . .  Prior to the testing of the whole telescope, CCD images
!were just made up, and could be useful engineering test patterns.  While this
!is still true, now that there is realistic data available, we can do better.
!To make the design of the real-time software easier, I would like to read the
!FITs data in (offline) and write it into a new file type, where the data is
!simply a long list of integers, one to a line.  The integers will be the 
!energy of the pixels, and their position in the list will imply the coordinate
!eg in the simplest of the several cases, first in the list is the energy of
!the bottom leftmost pixel, and so on along the bottom row, and so on.
!
!I am surely not the first to do this sort of thing, but if it turns out that
!I am the first subscriber to this list to do so - I'll post a follow up to
!give my findings.
!

There is a package of very useful programs for handling FITS files of
many descriptions known as FTOOLS.  It's available from
ftp://legacy.gsfc.nasa.gov/software (or some similar directory).  Have
a look while you're there at the other stuff in the archive; it pertains
to a large variety of other x- and gamma-ray astronomy missions &
instruments.  They have a web page at http://legacy.gsfc.nasa.gov/.
This site is maintained by the HEASARC, the NASA/Goddard High Energy
Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (and they do an excellent
job, by the way, in my opinion).

In particular, one of the FTOOLS programs called fimgdmp (ftools image
dump) does almost exactly what you want: lists values of pixels in a
FITS image.

---------
Richard J. Edgar  (edgar at uwast.astro.wisc.edu)
University of Wisconsin--Madison, Department of Astronomy
"An astrophysicist is someone who sees something working in practice,
and wonders whether it will work in principle." -- Harvey Liszt