FITS archive at NRAO
This is an archive for the
Flexible Image Transport System,
the standard data interchange and archival format
of the worldwide astronomy community.
Newcomers to the world of FITS are advised to consult
Overview of the FITS Data Format
and A Primer on the FITS Data Format.
the FITS
Support Office web pages are strongly recommended.
The formal documents which define the FITS standard
are
- Definition of the
Flexible Image Transport System
(FITS)
[NOST 100-2.0] which was adopted 2000-10-12 by a
formal vote of the IAU FITS Working Group
and was then published in the journal
Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The published paper is available in
PDF,
compressed Postscript and
HTML. The HTML version
includes appendices
which were omitted in the journal publication.
(The PDF version can be viewed with viewers such
as the xpdf
viewer (included with many Linux distributions) as
well as Adobe's
acrobat reader.)
- Representations of world
coordinates in FITS by Greisen and Calabretta
(241 Kbyte pdf file from A&A) Accepted: Volume
395, pages 1061-1075
- Representations of celestial
coordinates in FITS by Calabretta and Greisen
(1.22 Mbyte pdf file from A&A), Accepted: Volume
395, pages 1077-1122
(both of these were adopted 2002-12-18 by a formal
vote of the IAU-FWG and published in Astronomy &
Astrophysics).
- Representations of spectral
coordinates in FITS by Greisen,
Calabretta, Valdes, and Allen (901 Kbyte PDF, or
199 Mbyte gzipped PostScript, or 553
Mbyte PostScript)
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MIME media
types
Draft RFC
updated
2004-03-12
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An ad hoc task group led by Steve Allen is
developing an 'RFC' which will be used to
obtain official MIME media types for FITS.
The email exploder
fitsmime@nrao.edu
(see threads of discussion)
is being used for these discussions. To
subscribe to fitsmime,
fill in the fields in the "Subscribing to
fitsmime" section of the fitsmime web page.
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WCS proposals
Work on the third FITS World Coordinates
System [WCS] proposal "Representations
of spectral coordinates in FITS" is nearing
completion; see the links at the bottom of
Eric Greisen's home-page.
Mailing list
fitswcs@nrao.edu is
being used to facilitate WCS discussions.
To subscribe to
fitswcs, fill in the
fields in the "Subscribing to fitswcs" section
of the fitswcs web page.
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fitsbits/sci.astro.fits
Public discussion of FITS-related matters
occurs in newsgroup
sci.astro.fits (see
last 25 threads of discussion).
A bi-directional gateway connects
newsgroupsci.astro.fits to
Email exploder
fitsbits@nrao.edu;
the traffic content of the two services is
identical. To subscribe to
fitsbits, fill in the fields in
the "Subscribing to fitsbits" section of the
fitsbits web page.
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FITS material in this archive:
- documents
-- FITS-related documents
- os-support
-- code for various environments.
- data -- FITS files, in
several categories:
- samples
-- sample files from
facilities/disciplines.
- tests
-- collections of FITS files for
feature testing.
- src
-- FITS-related source code
- wcs
-- various World Coordinate System
sources
- traffic
-- archives for FITS-related newsgroups
& exploders.
-
wais-source
-- searching the FITS document archive.
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Other FITS archives are at:
- FITS
Support Office at the NASA Goddard
Space Flight Center
-
HEASARC at GSFC -- portable FITS
software packages
CFITSIO and
FTOOLS (W. Pence)
(
FITS overview)
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Other
FITS-related resources are at:
-
Specifications concerning designations for
astronomical radiation sources outside the
solar system
- FAQ about
scientific data formats (including
FITS). The author of this FAQ stopped
maintaining it five years ago (see
Ilana Stern). It is cited here
because it is not yet obsolete and because
there is not yet any substitute for it.
- AstroWeb:
Astronomy/Astrophysics resources on the Internet
- European
Standards for Open Information Interchange
-
A Summary of the International Standard
Date and Time Notation
-
Metadata and Data Management Info Page
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