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FITS or Flexible Image Transport System a digital file format used to store, transmit, and manipulate scientific and other images. FITS is the most commonly used digital file format in astronomy. Unlike many image formats, FITS is designed specifically for scientific data and hence includes many provisions for describing photometric and spatial calibration information, together with image origin metadata. A file format is a particular way to encode information for storage in a computer file. ...
A file format is a particular way to encode information for storage in a computer file. ...
A giant Hubble mosaic of the Crab Nebula, a supernova remnant Astronomy is the science of celestial objects (such as stars, planets, comets, and galaxies) and phenomena that originate outside the Earths atmosphere (such as auroras and cosmic background radiation). ...
In astronomy, photometry is the measurement of the flux or intensity of an astronomical objects electromagnetic radiation. ...
A major feature of the FITS format is that image metadata is stored in a human readable ASCII header, so that an interested user can examine the headers to investigate a file of unknown provenance. Each FITS file consists of one or more headers containing ASCII card images (80 character fixed-length strings) that carry keyword/value pairs, interleaved between data blocks. The keyword/value pairs provide information such as size, origin, coordinates, binary data format, free-form comments, history of the data, and anything else the creator desires: while many keywords are reserved for FITS use, the standard allows arbitrary use of the rest of the name-space. There are 95 printable ASCII characters, numbered 32 to 126. ...
A card image is an archaic term for an ASCII string, usually 80 bytes in length. ...
FITS is also often used to store non-image data, such as spectra, photon lists, data cubes, or even structured data such as multi-table databases. A FITS file may contain several extensions, and each of these may contain a data object. For example, it is possible to store x-ray and infrared exposures in the same file. Legend γ = Gamma rays HX = Hard X-rays SX = Soft X-Rays EUV = Extreme ultraviolet NUV = Near ultraviolet Visible light NIR = Near infrared MIR = Moderate infrared FIR = Far infrared Radio waves EHF = Extremely high frequency (Microwaves) SHF = Super high frequency (Microwaves) UHF = Ultra high frequency VHF = Very high frequency HF = High...
The word light is defined here as electromagnetic radiation of any wavelength; thus, X-rays, gamma rays, ultraviolet light, infrared radiation, microwaves, radio waves, and visible light are all forms of light. ...
In computing , a database can be defined as a structured collection of records or data that is stored in a computer so that a program can consult it to answer queries. ...
In the NATO phonetic alphabet, X-ray represents the letter X. An X-ray picture (radiograph) taken by Röntgen An X-ray is a form of electromagnetic radiation with a wavelength approximately in the range of 5 pm to 10 nanometers (corresponding to frequencies in the range 30 PHz...
Image of two girls in mid-infrared (thermal) light (false-color) Infrared (IR) radiation is electromagnetic radiation of a wavelength longer than that of visible light, but shorter than that of radio waves. ...
Images
The earliest and still most commonly used type of FITS data is an image header/data block. The term 'image' is somewhat loosely applied, as the format supports data arrays of arbitrary dimension -- normal image data are generally 2-D or 3-D (with the third dimension representing the color plane). The data themselves may be in one of several integer and floating-point formats, specified in the header.
FITS image headers can contain information about one or more scientific coordinate systems that are overlain on the image itself. Images contain an implicit Cartesian coordinate system that describes the location of each pixel in the image, but scientific uses generally require working in 'world' coordinates, for example the celestial coordinate system. As FITS has been generalized from its original form, the world coordinate system (WCS) specifications have become more and more sophisticated: early FITS images allowed a simple scaling factor to represent the size of the pixels; but recent versions of the standard permit multiple nonlinear coordinate systems, representing arbitrary distortions of the image. The WCS standard includes many different spherical projections, including, for example, the HEALPix spherical projection widely used in observing the cosmic microwave background radiation. In astronomy, a celestial coordinate system is a coordinate system for mapping positions in the sky. ...
A map projection is any method used in cartography (mapmaking) to represent the two-dimensional curved surface of the earth or other body on a plane. ...
Healpix (sometimes written as HEALPix) is a scheme for partitioning (or pixelizing) the sphere into a set of equal area pixels. ...
In cosmology, the cosmic microwave background radiation (most often abbreviated CMB but occasionally CMBR, CBR or MBR, also referred as relic radiation) is a form of electromagnetic radiation discovered in 1965 that fills the entire universe. ...
Tables FITS also supports tabular data with named columns and multidimensional rows. Both binary and ASCII table formats have been specified. The data in each column of the table can be in a different format from the others. Together with the ability to string multiple header/data blocks together, this allows FITS files to represent entire relational databases -- a far cry from simple image data.
Using FITS files FITS support via standard libraries is available in most languages that are used for scientific work, including C, FORTRAN, Java,Perl, PDL, Numerical Python, and IDL. The FITS Support Office at NASA/GSFC maintains a list of libraries and platforms that currently support FITS. C is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative computer programming language developed in 1972 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system. ...
Fortran (previously FORTRAN[1]) is a general-purpose[2], procedural,[3] imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. ...
Java is an object-oriented applications programming language developed by Sun Microsystems in the early 1990s. ...
Perl is a dynamic programming language created by Larry Wall and first released in 1987. ...
PDL (short for Perl Data Language) is a set of Array programming extensions to the Perl programming language. ...
Numerical Python (often abbreviated NumPy although technically NumPy refers uniquely to the latest edition of Numerical Python) is an extension to the Python programming language, adding support for large, multi-dimensional arrays and matrices, along with a large library of high-level mathematical functions to operate on these arrays. ...
IDL, short for interactive data language, is a programming language which is a popular data analysis language among scientists. ...
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is an agency of the United States federal government, responsible for the nations public space program. ...
NASAs Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), located in Greenbelt, Maryland, is a major space science laboratory. ...
Image processing programs such as the GIMP and Photoshop can generally read simple FITS images but frequently cannot interpret more complex tables and databases; scientific teams frequently write their own code to interact with their FITS data, using the tools available in their language of choice. The GNU Image Manipulation Program, or GIMP, is a raster graphics editor application with some support for vector graphics. ...
Adobe Photoshop is a bitmap graphics editor (with some text and vector graphics capabilities) published by Adobe Systems. ...
Many scientific computing environments make use of the coordinate system data in the FITS header to display, compare, rectify, or otherwise manipulate FITS images. Examples are the coordinate transform library included with PDL, the PLOT_MAP library in the solarsoft solar-physics-related software tree, and the Starlink_Project AST library in C. Solarsoft is a collaborative software development system created at Lockheed-Martin to support solar data analysis and spacecraft operation activities. ...
The Starlink Project was a UK astronomical computing project, which supplied general-purpose data reduction software. ...
See also Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) is a library and multi-object file format for the transfer of graphical and numerical data between computers. ...
Common Data Format (CDF) is a library and toolkit for multi-dimensional data sets. ...
NetCDF (Network Common Data Form) is a machine-independent, self-describing, binary data format standard for exchanging scientific data. ...
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