6.9 Celestial Coordinate System Subroutines

The FITS community has adopted a set of keyword conventions that define the transformations needed to convert between pixel locations in an image and the corresponding celestial coordinates on the sky, or more generally, that define world coordinates that are to be associated with any pixel location in an n-dimensional FITS array. CFITSIO is distributed with a couple of self-contained World Coordinate System (WCS) routines, however, these routines DO NOT support all the latest WCS conventions, so it is STRONGLY RECOMMENDED that software developers use a more robust external WCS library. Several recommended libraries are:

  WCSLIB -  supported by Mark Calabretta
  WCSTools - supported by Doug Mink
  AST library - developed by the U.K. Starlink project

More information about the WCS keyword conventions and links to all of these WCS libraries can be found on the FITS Support Office web site at http://fits.gsfc.nasa.gov under the WCS link.

The functions provided in these external WCS libraries will need access to the WCS information contained in the FITS file headers. One convenient way to pass this information to the external library is to use FITSIO to copy the header keywords into one long character string, and then pass this string to an interface routine in the external library that will extract the necessary WCS information (e.g., see the astFitsChan and astPutCards routines in the Starlink AST library).

The following FITSIO routines DO NOT support the more recent WCS conventions that have been approved as part of the FITS standard. Consequently, the following routines ARE NOW DEPRECATED. It is STRONGLY RECOMMENDED that software developers not use these routines, and instead use an external WCS library, as described above.

These routines are included mainly for backward compatibility with existing software. They support the following standard map projections: -SIN, -TAN, -ARC, -NCP, -GLS, -MER, and -AIT (these are the legal values for the coordtype parameter). These routines are based on similar functions in Classic AIPS. All the angular quantities are given in units of degrees.

1

Get the values of all the standard FITS celestial coordinate system keywords from the header of a FITS image (i.e., the primary array or an image extension). These values may then be passed to the subroutines that perform the coordinate transformations. If any or all of the WCS keywords are not present, then default values will be returned. If the first coordinate axis is the declination-like coordinate, then this routine will swap them so that the longitudinal-like coordinate is returned as the first axis.

If the file uses the newer 'CDj_i' WCS transformation matrix keywords instead of old style 'CDELTn' and 'CROTA2' keywords, then this routine will calculate and return the values of the equivalent old-style keywords. Note that the conversion from the new-style keywords to the old-style values is sometimes only an approximation, so if the approximation is larger than an internally defined threshold level, then CFITSIO will still return the approximate WCS keyword values, but will also return with status = 506, to warn the calling program that approximations have been made. It is then up to the calling program to decide whether the approximations are sufficiently accurate for the particular application, or whether more precise WCS transformations must be performed using new-style WCS keywords directly.

        FTGICS(unit, > xrval,yrval,xrpix,yrpix,xinc,yinc,rot,coordtype,status)

2

Get the values of all the standard FITS celestial coordinate system keywords from the header of a FITS table where the X and Y (or RA and DEC coordinates are stored in 2 separate columns of the table. These values may then be passed to the subroutines that perform the coordinate transformations.

        FTGTCS(unit,xcol,ycol, >
               xrval,yrval,xrpix,yrpix,xinc,yinc,rot,coordtype,status)

3

Calculate the celestial coordinate corresponding to the input X and Y pixel location in the image.

        FTWLDP(xpix,ypix,xrval,yrval,xrpix,yrpix,xinc,yinc,rot,
                          coordtype, > xpos,ypos,status)

4

Calculate the X and Y pixel location corresponding to the input celestial coordinate in the image.

        FTXYPX(xpos,ypos,xrval,yrval,xrpix,yrpix,xinc,yinc,rot,
                          coordtype, > xpix,ypix,status)