image compression

Tom Duvall wrote on Mar 09, 2011

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

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Mike Fitzpatrick wrote on Mar 09, 2011

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.

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Tom Duvall wrote on Mar 09, 2011

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

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Mike Fitzpatrick wrote on Mar 09, 2011

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

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Last post on Mar 09, 2011