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3.3 Unpacking OSSE Data on Unix Systems

If you've downloaded the data files using W3Browse in Unix, you will have a humongous .tar file sitting in your account, most likely with a name like `W3Browse-nnnnn.tar', where nnnnn is some number. This is easily unpacked into separate files with:

tar xvf [filename]
This step will leave the individual gzipped files in your directory under an `osse' directory tree. To unpack them:
gunzip *.gz
This will leave the files in your directory in FITS format. At present there are no tools for analyzing raw OSSE data directly in FITS. However, there are numerous tools for reading data from FITS files. IDL has a group of FITS manipulation routines in the astronomy library. There is also the CFITSIO library which works with both C and FORTRAN and is available through the HEASARC web pages.