Re: Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) file format support

[coccoinomane]

Hi Thomas,

thank you very much for your input. The functions you provided are indeed
very useful and prove that FITS files can be read at the lowest level within
Octave without relying on external libraries.

However, the structure in FITS files can be much more complicated than what
'readfitsfile' can understand.  Most notably, a FITS file can have
extensions, such as the "ASCII Table Extension" and the "Binary Table
extension", which have in turn many more specific entries in their headers.
Moreover, the FITS standard adopts a set of conventions to map pixel
locations in an image to corresponding celestial coordinates on the sky (or
other sets of real coordinates) called World Coordinate System (WCS). (For a
full reference, I find very useful the FITS Standard document at
http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov/fits_standard.html.)

My point is: I think it is possible to implement FITS file support in Octave
without relying on external libraries; however this is probably a long and
tedious task because of the complexity of the FITS file format. I guess that
wrapping an existing FITS-handling library (e.g. CFITSIO) by making use of
the C++ API is much easier.

Cheers,

Guido



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