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CFITSIO - A FITS File Subroutine Library

Quick Start Guide C Reference Guide

CFITSIO is a library of C and Fortran subroutines for reading and writing data files in FITS (Flexible Image Transport System) data format. CFITSIO provides simple high-level routines for reading and writing FITS files that insulate the programmer from the internal complexities of the FITS format. CFITSIO also provides many advanced features for manipulating and filtering the information in FITS files.

What's New:

  • 1 Oct 2009 - CFITSIO Version 3.21 released. This release fixes 3 relatively minor problems in the previous 3.20 release: 1) multithreaded programs now run correctly on Mac OS (they used to give a bus error), 2) increased the length of a character string in fpack.c that caused the "fpack -V" command to crash on some platforms, and 3) fixed an invalid comment delimiter ( //* ) in imcompress.c that some compilers complained about.

  • 9 Sept 2009 - New version 2.2 of CCFITS has been released. CCfits is an objected oriented interface to the CFITSIO library written in C++.

  • 4 Sept 2009 - CFITSIO Version 3.2 released. This major new release supports reading and writing FITS files with multi-threaded programs (under Unix/Linux). This release also contain a new 1.2.0 version of the fpack and funpack image compression utilities that support a new "subtractive dithering" technique when quantizing and compressing floating point images using the tiled-image compression convention. For a complete list of changes, see What's New in this release.

  • July 2009 - New version 5.3 of the Fv FITS file viewer and editor is available .

  • 10 May 2009 - New 3.181 beta release of a thread-safe version of CFITSIO (on Unix machines). This is compatible with multi-threaded application programs that use either the POSIX pthreads interface, or the OpenMP interface.

  • 18 March 2009 - CFITSIO Version 3.14 released, containing minor enhancements over the previous 3.13 version. This release also includes the latest 1.1.3 version of the fpack and funpack image compression utilities.

  • 20 August 2008 - new release of the fpack and funpack FITS image compression utility programs, version 1.1, is now available. The default Rice compression algorithm typically provides 30% better compression and is faster than using GZIP to compress a FITS image file.

Download the CFITSIO Software Library:

Documentation:

Related Software Tools:

  • NEW!  fpack and funpack FITS image compression utility programs.
  • Instantly verify any FITS file over the Web.
  • FITS Toolkit - Suite of simple C programs illustrating how to use CFITSIO
  • cookbook.f - Fortran example program that calls CFITSIO subroutines
  • Fv - The FITS file viewer and editor and portal to the NEW  Hera data analysis service.
  • fitsverify - Program that tests whether a FITS file conforms to all the format requirements

Interfaces for calling CFITSIO from Other Programming Languages:

E-mail Notification List

    To receive e-mail notification about new releases of CFITSIO, subscribe to the fitsionews mailing list by sending mail to majordomo@athena.gsfc.nasa.gov with the body (not the subject) of your message comprising the line

      subscribe fitsionews <your-email-address>

The latest reference to CFITSIO is: Pence, W. 1999, in ASP Conf. Ser., Vol. 172, Astronomical Data Analysis Software and Systems VIII, ed. D. Mehringer, R. Plante, and D. Roberts (San Francisco: ASP), 487

FITSIO is maintained by: Dr. William D. Pence, (email: pence 'at' milkyway.gsfc.nasa.gov)

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Last modified: Thursday, 01-Oct-2009 15:23:14 EDT