C library for STSDAS table format

Emilliano Gregori wrote on May 26, 2006

Hello,

for a synthetic photometry project I need to read/write STSDAS tables; do you know if there is a C library to read/write STSDAS tables?
By the way: is Starbase format compatible with STSDAS? And where exactly can I find the description for STSDAS tables format , in STSDAS docs?

Many thanks and kind regards,
Emiliano Gregori

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Mike Fitzpatrick wrote on May 26, 2006

or a synthetic photometry project I need to read/write STSDAS tables; do you know if there is a C library to read/write STSDAS tables?

The CVOS interface in STSDAS has a tables binding, see stsdas$lib/cvos and the doc subdirectory there.

By the way: is Starbase format compatible with STSDAS?

Not as far as I know. Starbase is an ascii table format.

And where exactly can I find the description for STSDAS tables format , in STSDAS docs?

See tables$doc/fileformat.doc

Cheers,
-Mike

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Emilliano Gregori wrote on May 26, 2006

Hello Mike,
many thanks for your reply.

I'm reading the docs, and maybe I'll write some stand-alone C functions to manage STSDAS tables, since linking to CVOS could not be the optimal solution...I don't know exactly up to know :)

In that case, I'll post the code somewhere in this site, if useful.

Cheers,
Emiliano

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Mike Fitzpatrick wrote on May 26, 2006

FITS binary tables are another option and will work with the TABLES package tasks as well. The CFITSIO interface could be used for this, and you can either use the FITS files directly or else TCOPY to change the format to .tab files. I'm not sure CITSIO is any easier to master, but bintables are usable outside of the system so there may be some advantage there.....

-Mike

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Emilliano Gregori wrote on May 26, 2006

for my thesis on integrated spectra of stellar populations, I'm writing a code to work with (synthetic) stellar spectra. I'm just using CFITSIO to read/write FITS observed spectra, but since I'd like to feed data to Synphot, it could be very useful to write spectra directly in STSDAS tables format (the format Synphot likes more, since in ASCII tables you can't specify things like flux units, and so on...).

I could write the output directly in FITS format, and then convert the spectra with imspec, or as you said, I could link to CVOS, but I'd like to have the fewer dependences on big external packages...

I'm now making few software experiments. Many thanks for your advice,

Emiliano

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Last post on May 26, 2006