image compression

duvall · Active IRAF User Joined: 08 Mar 2006 Posts: 43

Our images from the SDO satellite come in a compressed FITS format, described in http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/software/fitsio/compression.html. Currently, I use an external program to uncompress into a more usual format. This may not be the most efficient way to proceed and I was wondering if the iraf fits reader can read these files more directly. Newer versions of ds9 can read these images.
Tom

ps: I put an example image in http://sun.stanford.edu/~duvall/Iraf/testfits.fits

fitz · Posted: Wed Mar 09, 2011 7:35 pm Post subject:

At the moment we have tasks in the FITSUTIL package to compress and uncompress files like this, however there is a new FITS image kernel being developed now that will handle these images directly. It will be built on top of CFITSIO to handle the compression and is meant to be fully compatible with the existing fits kernel. We hope to introduce this in a release later this year.

duvall · Active IRAF User Joined: 08 Mar 2006 Posts: 43

I don't see the FITSUTIL package. Is it an external one that I need to load?
Tom

fitz · Posted: Thu Mar 10, 2011 1:10 am Post subject:

Yes, FITSUTIL is an external package. The tasks I referred to are the same FPACK/FUNPACK tasks you can get from CFITSIO.